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Title: The Dusk Watchman
Series: Twilight Reign #5
Author: Tom Lloyd
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 853
Words: 232K

Synopsis:

In the previous book Isak, using the power of the crystal skulls, forced the gods to remove the name of the Menin General from the world. This had the affect of cutting the heart out of the Menin army and allowing the Farlan and King Emin to survive to fight another day against Ruhen, aka Azeur the Shadow.

Azeur continues to collect more crystal skulls, as do Isak and Co. It is also revealed that Azeur has the Sword of Life and that he has some sort of plan for becoming the god of gods. It is up to Isak and Co to stop him.

Isak sets out on a quest to recover the Sword of Death, to counter Azeur's Sword of Life. At the same time Emin raises the last army in the lands to go against Azeur and stop whatever ceremony he has planned. Unbeknowst to them all, Azeur has had this all planned out from the beginning and the recovery of the Death sword and the massive death toll that a battle will entail is exactly what he wants.

After several betrayals by supposed Allies everything culminates as Azeur tries to go from being just a shadow to a god of gods. Isak has realized his weakness, as a shadow, and uses that against him. Isak sacrifices his own life and binds Azeur to one of Isak's allies, who dies. The ceremony goes through and makes Azeur the most powerful being, but since he is still a shadow attached to a human, it is more of a symbiotic relationship. This tempers Azeur's control over the gods and allows the land to heal.

My Thoughts:

I wasn't really paying attention when I started this book, so I couldn't remember if it was the final book or if there was one more after it and I was too lazy to go look it up. (for the record, it is the final book) Part way through though I decided that if there was one more book that I wouldn't bother reading it. I was bored and plot was overly convoluted and not particularly well executed.

That might very well apply to this whole series and it took me until this book to come to grips with it. This book wasn't worse than the previous, even though my rating plunged. It was the accumulated burden of it all crashing down on my shoulders.

Boring and convoluted are the best descriptions I can come up with. Lloyd doesn't write well enough to convey clearly what he is intending, or well enough that when he does reveal something that you realize what it is that he has revealed. I have to admit that I'm still very confused about the ending and how what Isak and Mihn (the guy who gets bonded to Azeur) did accomplished what the author said it did in the epilogue. Plus, Mihn was supposed to have died earlier in the book. How did he survive and get to where Isak and Azeur were? It was just a lot of little dots that were missing between the big dots that left me confused on how to connect them all.

After finishing this series, I wouldn't recommend taking the time to read it. At over 3K pages and 1.1million words, the pay off just isn't worth it. There are too many head scratching moments and poorly constructed sentences that left me going “huh?” to tell others to read this.

On the other hand, I do recommend the God Fragments series by Lloyd. Smaller in size, scope and characters, it is tighter writing and what THIS series should have had done to it. There are still awkward sentences but Lloyd seems to be getting over that, thankfully.

★★☆☆½ ( )

Oh what an ending to this magnificent 5-book story!
Amazing. The actual end... hmmm... the end... ( )