The black feather three have been called upon to steal back an ancient artefact necessary to mountain-town of Skaldshollow to make the giant stone servants they use for everyday tasks. But the ice cold Narhl people and an ancient, powerful mage – not to mention a demon and a god – all have plans for it too. Will wily, impulsive rogue Wydrin, conflicted and mighty knight Sebastian and confused and powerful mage Frith manage to stay these new bouts of evil?

This summary doesn’t even BEGIN to summarise this book. There is just SO MUCH in there – from underwater cities to new strange beasts to mages and sorcery and just – wow! It was all in there! Williams managed to move us quickly through epic, huge and treacherous scenes of battle and adventure again and again all the way through this beast of a book. And I did enjoy it. But by the end, I was still left thinking… I read a book that big, and they only got this far?

Again here I managed to jump into a series that was already a book in, meaning I had some catching up to do with the characters. Happily a good dose of catch up was weaved in there, and I managed to get a hold of their main characteristics; but never enough to care deeply about them. A large cast of other characters were introduced too, who we got to know at varying levels.

As a world, this was huge and varied and well imagined. For the scope of it I would have liked to read the other book too – it feels like a well put together world filled with so many exciting things! It was quite amazing to see so many scenes and ideas and creatures appear before us.

But yes. I was left thinking that for a novel of that length, really the story should have expanded a bit more. I mean, sure, the whole world was put in pretty severe danger, but in the end they basically completed the quest they started on, with a few big diversions on the way. This is probably because it’s part of a series – but I’m not sure that I’d venture on any more.