Loved this, can't wait for the next. I like the way bits of revelation about the characters' pasts come through the series gradually, rather than knowing about them all at once. The downside is that sometimes these things come out of the blue, with no foreshadowing of them. I don't recall hearing of the mage Darril in earlier books, and Dubric's conversation with Brushgar about the way their country (or whatever) is run was somewhat surprising - Dubric's role has always come across as more of a police chief (or really, homicide detective), even though his title is castellan. Perhaps his role in other matters is more active when he's not investigating a murder, which is why we don't see those aspects of his job But I'm wondering if, as the series continues, the author is deepening her characters' stories on the fly, making some of these parts of their backstories seem unexpected. But that's a minor thing - the plot was fascinating and the characters are great. ( )

What I enjoy most about Jones’ books isn’t the mystery plot — though they are interesting — so much as the characters. That was a good thing for this book, because the plot didn’t work for me and left me unsatisfied (and more annoyed the more I thought about it) at the end.

Valley of the Soul, the third about Dubric Byerly and his employees/friends, was a lot less gory than the second book, Threads of Malice, which made me happy. This one involves the hunt for a possible blood mage who’s been killing sheep, maybe for practice before starting on people.

The characters are great — they’re likeable, but not overly so, and they face real problems with realistic reactions (or overreactions). There was a little bit of the “if the characters actually talked about x, the plot would disappear” problem, but it didn’t seem too unlikely that they would avoid talking about x.

The plot problems:

First — I almost put it down very early, when a character did something a) stupid and b) out of character. Jones is usually very careful about motivations and actions, and this stuck out as something that the character only did because it was required by the plot. I made a conscious decision to pretend it hadn’t happened or that it was a clumsy way of introducing a red herring.

Second — Spoilers on my blog! http://www.scriniary.smallinfinity.net/blog/2007/04/14/4-valley-of-the-soul-tama...

I’ll keep future Dubric books on my list to read, but I won’t look forward to the next one as much as I looked forward to this one. Jones has an interesting world and excellent characters, but with each of her books so far I’ve been less and less impressed by the plot. ( )