Last night I finished reading the third book in the series; Blood of the Fold. I was frantically reading as fast as 
I could and staying up late again to keep reading this wonderful adventure. However, I had the distinct impression as I finished this book that the author made the same mistake as he did in the second book. In my perception it was a shortcoming, but it may have been planned. It was too long ago to remember if the first book suffered the same fate. What problem did I perceive? 
The second book was 900+ pages long and covered but a few months of time. Several events were happening at once in very distance separated places. During one part of the second book almost one hundred pages were devoted to the buildup and attack of the outnumbered Galeans against the Imperial Order’s troops. Painstaking detail left me riveted to the pages as the story unfolded. And then suddenly I realized that there were only 100 pages before I would reach the end of the book.
Anxiety began to slowly place its grip upon me as I wondered what could be resolved in such short notice. The buildup was there but how would there be enough pages to bring it to conclusion? And then in a flurry of pages all the loose ends were tied up, the hero conquered, everyone was happy, and it was the end. It almost felt like the writer couldn’t write fast enough to keep up and the ending just happened all at once. I felt dismayed that there was so much buildup and such intimate detail and great story and so little conclusion.
Once we hit the climax of the story both the author and the reader fell off a precipitous cliff to the end. I know that I began to read faster and with more intensity as I neared the end, but it felt like the author felt that same urgency and wanted to reach that happy ending and inadvertently left out some of the juicy details that we had been feasting upon all along.
Maybe this was done by design. Maybe I would have cried out in anguish if the ending had been all long and drawn out. Maybe the author realized that by the time I reached the last page my eyes would be bloodshot from lack of sleep and my breaths short from constant pangs of fear and anxiety and my endurance near gone from following the characters through such realistic adventures and so the author did me a favor and helped me reach the glorious end just a few pages early.
What do you think?
Either way, I will be continuing on this quest. Here comes Book 4, Temple of the Winds.
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