The Tormay Trilogy by Christopher Bunn

I do not normally review more than one book in a series at the same time. However, I feel that this trilogy reads much more like one book in three volumes and that each of the titles cannot really be treated as a stand-alone book.

Disclaimer: I was given this trilogy free by the author via a Librarything Member Giveaway, in return for an honest review.

The Hawk and His Boy

My Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 3.90 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.75 / 5.00

The Shadow at the Gate

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.20 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.02 / 5.00

The Wicked Day

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.40 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.98 / 5.00

Jute is a young thief in the city of Hearne, seat if the Regent and the center of Tormay. As an orphan he was taken in by the Juggler and put to work as a pick-pocket and burglar and it quickly became obvious that he had a special talent for avoiding the magical wards that are used to protect property. On night this talent is needed to gain entrance to a wizards’ house so that a certain box can be stolen. Jute is warned not to open the box, but to return it to his partner in crime, the Knife. However, after wriggling down the chimney and finding the box, Jute feels compelled to open it and accidentally cuts his finger on the knife inside. When he returns to the top of the chimney he hands over the box to the Knife, but is then betrayed.

Ronan of Aum is also known as the Knife, assassin and executioner of the Thieves Guild, answerable only to the Silentman who runs the Guild. He did not want to kill the boy, but that was the job he was paid to carry out. It seemed like a terrible betrayal to pull him up to the top of the chimney only to inject the poison and then push him back into the dark, but someone had paid very handsomely to retrieve that box and they wanted the job kept as secret as possible. Even so, he felt bad for the boy and his death. If only he could save up enough money to leave Hearne and live peacefully on an island in the far northwest, far away from the Guild and its casual violence.

Levoreth is the niece of the Duke of Dolan, but she is also something much older. She has an affinity with the earth, able to awaken flowers and plants and bend them to her will. She can also communicate with animals, which revere her. Her uncle is determined to attend the Autumn Fair in Hearne so that he can view the Regent’s horses, and Levoreth is to travel with him in order to possibly find a husband. However, she feels a change in the land and fears that she has been asleep and complacent for too long.

The miller’s daughter, Fen, wakes with a gasp in her home in the Rennet Valley. There is a strange smell of death in the air and an unnatural silence. She sees the barn door open and rushes down to secure it against foxes. However, inside she finds the family’s old dog with his throat ripped out and then she catches sight of a tall, thin man with a long knife and a pair of monstrous dogs coming out of her house. She seeks shelter in the hayloft, but somehow the hounds know where she is and jump up to attack. As she scrambles away from their jaws she falls down through a trapdoor into the spikes of the harrow. She is impaled but protected by the spikes as she loses consciousness.

Severan is a scholar, not a real wizard, although he knows quite a few words of power. He spends his day searching through the remains of the ruined University for the Gerecednes, a treatise on the four Anbeorun, the stillpoints of the four elements: earth, fire, water and wind. The book is supposed to contain words of power that have not been spoken since the very creation of the world. However, at the moment he is nursing the boy Jute who fell down one of the chimneys on the night that the box with the carvings of the hawk was stolen. Severan’s fellow wizard, Nio, is very upset that the box has been taken and wants to question the boy to discover where the box is now. In fact, Severan has started to worry about Nio: the man seems obsessed with the box and there is a strange smell coming from the basement.

As you can see, this is quite a complex tale, with several storylines intertwined. At first, it seems that we will be following the boy Jute through his adventures, but it quickly becomes obvious that the book has a much greater scope than that. Unfortunately, many of these elements are introduced in the first few chapters, so it does seem like we are bouncing about a country with no real understanding of what is connecting the people that we are visiting. This sense of too many threads is compounded by the introduction of ‘Ronan’ in one of the early chapters when we do not know that Ronan is another name for the Knife. However, as the first volume progresses, these disparate strands start to make more sense as the action converges on the city of Hearne and our characters begin to interact. In the end, we end up with a satisfying collection of story threads that interweave to produce an interesting pattern.

We have a fairly large cast of characters, many of whom have a name and a title, which can be a little confusing at first. Fortunately, most of the characterization is very strong, so that each person has their own ‘voice’ and they and out from one another reasonably well. Jute is basically the central character of the story, and he does show the greatest development during his journey. However, he remains a street urchin at heart and is a very believable character. His relationships with the other characters are also believable, and some of the best dialogue comes in his interplay with the Hawk. The Hawk becomes Jute’s mentor, and is as crotchety and arrogant as any wizened old Kung Fu master that I have ever seen or read. He was probably my favorite character. Ronan is also an interesting character, although he begins the story as the villain. As we get to know him he changes quite dramatically in our eyes, and eventually becomes a very honorable and courageous hero. Levoreth shows very little development during the story, but that is due to her nature: I will not say any more about this as I do not want to throw out any spoilers. These are really the main protagonists, although it takes a while for that to become obvious.

The secondary characters are also enjoyable. Severan and several of the old scholars are surprisingly courageous and resourceful in difficult situations. However, Nio is a fine example of how good intentions can be perverted by the desire for power at all costs. He begins the story as a man teetering on the brink of falling to the ‘Dark Side’ and his journey is a tale of obsession and remorselessness. Fen plays a much smaller part in the story than I had expected, although she does draw us into the house of Owain Gawinn, the Captain of the Guard in Hearne. He is a pragmatic man and charismatic leader who tries to protect the country whilst he is constantly rebuffed by the allegedly impoverished Regent. Possibly my favorite of the secondary characters is a ghost that attaches himself to Jute part way through Volume 2 and then stays with him until the bitter end. He is very old and so has forgotten who he is and most of the useful knowledge that he once had. He constantly drones on about any given subject at great length, only stopping occasionally to bemoan his situation. The Hawk gets very frustrated with him and they make a great double act.

The world building is well done and we are rarely presented with piles of exposition. There is an interesting magic system based upon the use of words of power that can be used to take control of things. I especially liked the idea of the magical wards, which had a variety of uses varying from simple alarms when a door was opened to disguising a person’s identity. We are also provided with a creation myth and a far portion of history relating the battle between the Anbeorun and the Darkness that seeks to destroy all life. Elements of this did seem a little similar to Tolkien’s creation story, as outlined in The Silmarillion, but was sufficiently different to keep me interested. One aspect of this world that I particularly liked was the interaction with animals. Some, like the Hawk, were able to speak to all humans, but mostly we saw exchanges between Levoreth and the various animals that she encountered. There was one particularly delightful scene with her helping a squirrel by asking a tree to grow a branch towards another tree so that it could gather nuts without crossing the ground and being harassed by foxes.

On the whole this was a fantasy with some elements of epic scale, such as battles and whole nations plunged into conflict. However, in the great tradition of Tolkien, it kept a firm grounding in the actions of individuals and their connection to the homes and families.

Reviews I Recommend:

The Hawk and His Boy by Fantasy Book Critic

The Shadow at the Gate by Fantasy Book Critic

At The End by John Hennessy

My Rating: 1.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.10 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.89 / 5.00

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book free from the author via a Librarything Member Giveaway, in return for an honest review.

From Goodreads:

Night 1: 12 billion taken.

Day 1: Confusion.

Night 2: 13 billion taken.

Day 2: Panic.

Night 3: 13 billion taken.

Day 3: The fight for survival begins.

In 2048, the human population borders 39 billion after the termination of the birth control industry, and the realities of overcrowding have sunken into the minds of the world, until billions mysteriously go missing. In the wake of civilization’s collapse, a trio of teenage gamers from Washington struggle to endure. Maggy, a strong-willed intellectual, leads Darrel and Félix, two shy geeks, on an expedition down the west coast, as they try to determine the source of humanity’s downfall.

A YA post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller.

As you can see from the description above, this looks like an interesting premise, so I was pleased to receive a free copy from the author. I am partial to good Sci-Fi and I like the way that post-apocalyptic novels can explore society and show character development. However, this book left me confused, frustrated and disappointed.

We begin the book in the point of view of Darrel and we are told almost at once that the cause of the ‘mysterious’ disappearances is not all that mysterious: huge space craft arrived over all the major cities on Earth the day before the first people vanished. Although Darrel has no idea how they were taken, it is obvious that they have been beamed aboard the space ships or vaporized by the aliens. It seems that Darrel was spared from his parents’ fate by some foil that he had wrapped around his bed many years earlier. This seemed a pretty groan-worthy plot device, but was confirmed when both of Darrel’s equally nerdy friends were the sole survivors in their households. They team up, wrap themselves in foil, and set off to find out where everyone has gone. They discover that some humans have been left behind so that they can be hunted by the aliens who look like six-legged lions, which the team nickname ‘alions’. After surviving a massive explosion and several car crashes I could no longer suspend my disbelief and stopped reading, so I do not know if the trio managed to defeat the alien menace, although I imagine that they do.

From the description I was expecting a lot more mystery and tension than the book delivered. This could have been resolved by placing the teens in a more rural setting and disabling the television and radio systems so that they had no idea what was going on. We would then have had a much more gradual and tense discovery of the aliens and their intentions. I also struggled with the teens surviving incidents that would have left them all badly injured and incapable of continuing their journey. These seemed unnecessary, placing them in situations of jeopardy through their own stupidity and requiring unbelievable and overly dramatic escapes. Surviving one such incident can be ascribed to amazingly good luck, but a series of them reduces my capacity to believe in the characters if they are supposed to be normal humans in a normal universe.

The main characters were fairly cliché and two dimensional, with the obligatory love triangle to add to the mix. They made some very odd decisions, such as driving towards the giant alien ship hovering over Seattle, rather than driving away from it or at least going around the city. Although I can understand that teenagers might not make the best decisions in this kind of situation, they did seem to behave in a manner that was inconsistent with their supposed intelligence. Their dialogue was very irritating, with an overuse of the terms ‘bromigo / bramiga’. Also, it was also unfortunate that the author chose to use both the characters’ names and nicknames without any explanation of who was who, so I was often confused about who was being spoken to or about.

I also think that it was a serious misstep to change the point of view from one chapter to the next. This would have worked well if the author was not using a first person narrative. At the beginning of the second chapter it took me several pages to work out whose head I was in. This was very confusing and seemed mostly a way of telling us what Maggy was feeling about Felix, which could have been done far more successfully by showing us through her dialogue and actions.

The book was not without imagination. I was intrigued by some of the technology that the author envisioned for this future Earth, which was mostly powered by solar technology. I loved the idea that the solar-powered cars were too quiet to be safe and so they had to emit fake car noises to stop people being run over. However, the solar power did act as a plot device as well because it allowed electrical appliances to work, making survival a whole lot easier than it would be in the same situation today. We were told that Maggy had metallic eyes and I wanted to know more about that and why she had them. Were they necessary because she was blind or had damaged her normal eyes, or were they some sort of upgrade? Were they a fairly typical thing or extremely rare and unusual?

In short, this book was not really what the description promised, and that is always disappointing to discover. If a story promises a mystery I expect to read a far bit of it before I discover what the mystery actually is, otherwise I lose the sense of suspense. If I am sold a story of teens struggling to endure, I expect them to do just that: I do not expect them to simply walk down to the local megamart and stock up on everything they need and suffer no hardships at all because everything is solar powered. Throw in some not very well developed characters that do highly improbable things and I am not likely to care what happens to them.

Wired by Douglas E. Richards

My Rating: 2.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.00 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 3.59 / 5.00

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book free from the author via a Librarything Member Giveaway, in return for an honest review.

David Desh used to be in Special Forces, but left after his team died in Iran and he was burned out mentally and emotionally. He is now a security expert, so he is surprised when his old commanding officer calls him to offer him a job. David needs to find Kira Miller, a brilliant genetic engineer who is believed to be behind a terrifying biological agent that could destroy most of western civilization. She has bioengineered a form of the Ebola virus that can be fed to the populous and then triggered at a latter date, when the infected person eats pig products. This weapon is being developed for Al Qaida and she must be found and stopped before she can pass it to her employers. She has also developed a method for increasing the efficiency of brain usage that turns into a savant for short periods of time. Unfortunately, the increased intelligence brings with it a ruthlessness that borders on megalomania and can be incredibly dangerous.

I have a scientific background and I like a good Thriller, so I was pleased to receive my free copy of this book. I thought the premise of an intelligence-enhancing serum sounded fascinating and gave a lot of scope for exploring this next step in man’s evolution and we certainly do see that addressed in the book when the enhanced characters become unfeeling and dismissive of other humans. However, this exploration consisted of either long discussions or internal monologues that were very drawn out and therefore counterproductive as it became difficult to maintain interest in them whilst trying to find out what happened next. The author spent far too much time telling us about the effects of the serum rather than showing it to us, which would have been much more interesting.

The plot itself was confused with lots of unnecessary action and ‘twists’ that were so obvious as to be laughable. Rather than keeping us guessing about Kira and her allegiance, we are very quickly shown that she is actually an innocent who is being set up by an unknown evil. This was disappointing because it meant that all the further hints at her being a bad guy were pointless and just made me feel like the author did not really know how to handle his plot. There were also far too many improbable escapes and happy coincidences for my liking and a bad guy who seemed to be omniscient.

Speaking of whom, the villain of the piece is so two dimensional that I half expected him to pull out a white Persian cat and sneer, “No Mr Desh, I expect you to die!” followed by insane cackling. Indeed all the characters are pretty dull, although the aged Special Forces CO was interesting enough, but the most rounded character was the hairy computer geek. He had some great lines and showed genuine change through the book, and his scene as a genius was hilarious. However, our hero was far too standard and much too perfect, whilst our genius heroine was simply unbelievable. I did not really care about their continued survival, and that is never a good thing to say about the main characters.

The writing was generally dull and cluttered with far too much exposition rather than showing us who the characters are and what they are thinking and doing. The dialogue was used mostly for information dumping rather than character development, which made it uninteresting and hard to read. I am never happy when people sit down in the middle of a stressful situation to detail their history and explain why they think as they do: it just does not seem real to me and so it pulls me out of the story.

The scientific basis of the premise seemed very unlikely to my mind: I am not overly familiar with genetic engineering but I am a biology graduate and some of the ideas used seemed unworkable to me. I see that Mr Richards has training in microbiology and molecular biology, so I understand where he gets his ideas from, I just wish he had kept in mind that whole humans do not behave in the same way as a few cells in a test tube. However, my biggest complaint about the science is that there was just so much unnecessary explanation that it got really, really boring. A good editor would have jettisoned the majority of it and retained just a simple outline that would have given more time for the rest of the story. This is supposed to be a thriller after all, not a scientific thesis.

This was an OK thriller, but the premise promised so much more. The plot has more twists than seems sensible and, unfortunately, most of them are so obvious that they are very predictable. The characterization was weak, with the most interesting character being one of the supporting cast. The dialogue was uninteresting and there was far too much exposition. The science was not very well thought through and explained to the point of utter boredom. The ending was preposterous and I have no intention of moving on to the second book in the series.

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

My Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 3.90 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.16 / 5.00

This book is the second volume in the Gentleman Bastards series: you can find my review of the first book, The Lies and Locke Lamora, here. There are spoilers for that book below. I read it as part of a Read Along.

At the end of the first book, we saw Locke Lamora and his faithful sidekick, Jean Tannen, floating off into the sunset after they barely survived their defeat of the Grey King. Deciding that they should leave Camorr for safer shores, we follow them to Tal Verrar where Locke develops an amazing plan to steal from the amazingly wealthy Requin, owner of the biggest gambling house on the islands that make up the city.

Requin’s vault is notoriously impossible to crack, plus getting to it is a suicide mission, because it is inside the Sunspire, a nine-story casino where the wealthiest people in the city come to flaunt their wealth. In order to rise up the floors one must develop a good line of credit and impress Requin and cheating is punishable by death: which places Locke and Jean at a bit of a disadvantage! However, this just makes the challenge even greater and they spend two years getting all their pieces in place so that they can execute their most audacious plan to date.

Unfortunately, just as they are about to become richer than their wildest dreams, an old adversary from Camorr surfaces and draws them to the attention of the Archon, leader of the Tal Verrar’s military. He decides to use such expert con men to begin a war with the local pirates in order to secure his own power over the city. In order to do this he doses Locke and Jean with a time-delayed poison and then sets them the task of learning how to captain a ship with the understanding that he will provide the antidote as long as they follow his orders. Finally, he sends them off with a crew drawn from a prison to find some pirates. As you can imagine, this does not go quite to plan and we see mutiny and much deck scrubbing before Locke can use his persuasive powers to fulfill his orders. Plus, he forgets to pack the obligatory cats, so they are all cursed with bad luck.

I absolutely loved The Lies of Locke Lamora, so it made perfect sense to join the Read Along of the second book in the series. In many ways this could be read as a stand alone book, because there is not a great deal of knowledge needed from the first one. On the whole, the references back to The Lies of Locke Lamora were not necessary to the story, but would make anyone familiar with it smile in recognition.

This time the ‘gang’ is much reduced, with only Locke and Jean surviving the war with the Grey King. The Prologue begins with the exquisite torture of a scene that has Jean betraying Locke when they are held at gunpoint. Mr Lynch places that doubt in your mind from the beginning and we spend a great deal of the book remembering that scene and second-guessing Jean’s motives. This adds to the tension that has developed between the two characters that are now somewhat uneasy in their relationship.

At first, Locke has basically given up on everything, drinking his life away and developing an incredibly ripe odor. In the meantime, Jean goes about the necessities of life, finding them somewhere safe and providing money for food and, more importantly to Locke, drink. However, he can only stand Locke’s self-pity for so long until he makes a stand and forces Locke to sober up and take responsibility for himself. In this sequence we see Jean come out from Locke’s shadow and become an equal partner in their team rather than just the brawn to Locke’s brain. He proves to be just as devious and persuasive as Locke, although he is much less reckless, and much, much more determined. He is the strong one of the pair, both physically and mentally, and yet he is tender and understanding of his friend’s grief. Jean is a great friend with intense loyalty, which makes that Prologue so difficult to forget.

What begins as another heist plot soon changes tack and becomes political espionage as our intrepid heroes are forced to work for the Archon, who knows their true identities thanks to the Bondsmagi. Being somewhat unforgiving in their outlook, the Bondsmagi want the pair dead because of their treatment of the Falconer in Camorr. They make their presence felt in a truly hair-raising scene, but then leave the Archon to do all of their dirty work. He doses our boys with a poison that will only become active if they do not take the antidote in time: sneaky! So, we are off a journey to find some pirates, who turn out to be surprisingly nice.

One of the great aspects of this book is the arrival of not one, but two, lady pirates. Captain Zamira is a woman with two small children on board and Ezri is her First Mate, who seems to like the look of Jean. As Grace points out at Books Without Any Pictures, we even have a lesbian captain and all the women are treated exactly the same as the men. We spend a lot of time with the pirates and their culture is well developed and very interesting, what with their paranoia about having cats on board and their unusual sense of honor and fair play. We have sea battles and a wonderfully evocative pirate town hidden in the depths of an island. It is all rather “Pirates of the Caribbean” and I kept expecting Johnny Depp to jump out at any moment, so if you like that genre you will enjoy these sections of the books.

But, of course, there is plenty of treachery, double-crossing and deception to keep us off-balance and wondering what is going on. Just when we think we understand who is behind what plot, everything changes and we are back to being clueless again. In this way we are kept dangling, like a fish on a line, until the very end of the book, which has yet another wonderful twist to make us anxious to read book three. However, it did seem like Mr Lynch over-egged the pudding somewhat: with only a few chapters to go it seemed impossible that he could resolve all the plot lines and it did seem a little rushed at that point. There was one section in particular that I really wanted more detail on because I really wanted to enjoy what happened to the people of Salon Corbeau near the end. Also, we are left with at least three unresolved plot points: one of which is absolutely crucial. I guess that Mr Lynch felt a little safer leaving these aspects until book three now that the first two books have been successful.

As Redhead raves at the Little Red Reviewer, there are a lot of good things in this book. The characterization is as excellent as ever, with wonderful dialogue and laugh-out-loud scenes. There is wonderful humor and a wonderful romance, that will have you crying into your rum.

Other Reviews I Recommend:

Fantasy Café

Lynn’s Book Blog

Tethyan Books

Travels Through Iest

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

My Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Amazon Rating: 4.50 / 5.00

Goodreads Rating: 4.13 / 5.00

Perseus Jackson is called Percy by his friends, not that he has many. He is what they call a ‘troubled’ twelve year old, diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. Add in serious impulse control issues and a very bad temper, and it is easy to understand why he never lasts more than a few months in any school before he is expelled. It is almost the same at Yancy Academy, only this time he has found a friend, Grover, and a teacher that he actually likes, Mr Brunner, who teaches Latin. However, during a field trip to a museum, Percy’s pre-algebra teacher, Ms Dodds, turns into a large, winged creature and attacks him. Percy vividly remembers Mr Brunner throwing him a pen that becomes a sword, which causes Ms Dodds to disintegrate when he hits her. This is strange enough, but when he gets outside no one else remembers Ms Dodds at all, not even Mr Brunner.

At the end of the year, Percy returns to the apartment that he and his mother, Sally, share with his horrid stepfather, Gabe. Sally decides that she and Percy should take a brief holiday in Long Island, but then Grover turns up, shows them that he is in fact a satyr and warns them that the Furies are coming. As they race towards a safe place called Camp Half-Blood, they are attacked and Sally disappears in a golden shower of light as the Minotaur strangles her. In his fury, Percy kills the Minotaur so that he and Grover can get to the safety of Camp Half-Blood. Once in the Camp, Percy discovers that he is the son of a god, as are all the other children there and Mr Brunner is actually the centaur Chiron. As if that were not shocking enough it soon becomes clear that the gods hold Percy responsible for stealing Zeus’ lightning bolt, so he has to go on a Quest to find it before returning it to its rightful owner.

I chose this book as my ‘Mythology’ title for the Once Upon A Time VI Challenge. I found it difficult to find an interesting title in that genre but I had heard that the Percy Jackson books were very good. I did see the film adaptation, which I thought was pretty poor. However, I know that it is very difficult for films to recapture what makes a book great: the Harry Potter novels are far superior to their film counterparts. I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised, and I was.

Percy has a cynical, world-weary tone of voice and we immediately sympathize with the unwarranted persecution that seems to follow him from school to school. He seems to have nothing going for him, what with the ADHD and dyslexia, and I can understand his frustration with trying to cope in classes. I found the later explanation of his dyslexia a little forced, although I have studied ancient Greek myself and I could never get the hang of the different letterforms, so it did make sense to me. This does bring me to one minor criticism though: I was confused as to why the phrase “Di immortales!” was used so much. This is the Latin for “By the immortal gods!” but I thought that they were hard wired for Greek, not Latin. I was also a little confused as to why Mr Brunner / Chiron was a Latin teacher but included Greek mythology in the course: I can only assume that this is an aspect of the American education system, with which I am not familiar, as Mr Riordan thanks a Classicist for his input.

The other characters were also appealing, although I felt that they were not given much room to show any complexity. I am not sure if this is due to the fact that Percy is the narrator or not. I particularly liked Grover and his habit of munching on tin cans. Chiron was suitably fatherly and wise, while Mr D made an excellent camp leader: totally disinterested in his charges and ever so put-upon. I liked Annabeth, the Hermione clone, but it would be so nice to see a girl who was not the brains of the operation, but the brawn instead. I also thought that her Cap of Invisibility was a rather blatant nod to Harry Potter’s cloak and provided an overly easy answer to many of their problems. I would have preferred to see more examples of quick thinking like that in the scene with Cerberus, which was actually rather cute.

As Ellie at Musings of a Bookshop Girl comments, the action is face paced with the mythology nicely integrated into modern America. It is also nice that the gods behave more like petulant children than all-powerful beings. They have their petty disputes and, as the Little Red Reviewer notes, they have not changed since ancient times, even if they now wear beautiful Italian suits or Hawaiian shirts. Refreshingly, Percy is untrusting of the adults he meets and so he avoids that starry-eyed, too-good-to-be-true vibe that YA characters can have. I guess my other criticism is that the book definitely seems to read as if it is aimed at the YA audience, which is something I did not feel whilst reading The Hunger Games recently, or remember from the Harry Potter novels or those in the His Dark Materials trilogy. However, I will try the next book in the series.