Road of the Patriarch

So there's this guy, Salvatore, and he writes...a lot. I'm a big fan of his Forgotten Realms books, the "Drizzt" books, but there's a lot more characters than just one conflicted Dark Elf running around in them. Road of the Patriarch is the third book of the Sellswords trilogy featuring a bunch of bad guys, that became popular enough to get the good guy treatment.

Jarlaxle is a Drow, who is witty, charming, part swashbuckler, and apparently has the powers of a genie when it comes to summoning and using magic items that can give him any kind of power, at any time. It gets a little old to be honest, just once you'd like to see him get taken down a notch. There's the Dwarf, Athrogate, who has got some really cool weapons, an even cooler mount, but he is way too over-the-top when it comes to negative Dwarven stereotypes. He's also a relatively new character, so he may get better over time, and I'm a sucker for Dwarf stuff. Then there's Artemis, who the book is really all about. When he made his debut, geez, almost twenty years ago, he was a stone cold killer, brutal, scary, efficient. Now he's all justified, and righteous, and has a conscious. I don't mind that too much, but most of the book was spent on developing him, which is cool, but little else really happened.

Book two, the Promise of the Witch King really needs to be read right before this one, without a gap between them. I waited well over a year between them and was kinda lost throughout a lot of the book. There were some great characters introduced, but only briefly, and whole trilogies could be written on them alone, but they disappear too quickly. It also seemed like the first half of the book could have been added to book two, while the second half of the book could've been expanded and just made into a book all its own. I'll spare the actual plot recap, besides, Amazon.com has about as good of one as you can get here. It had a user rating of four stars, frankly that may be a bit generous. It's a good book, if read in conjunction with the others, but overall, it just didn't grab me like I had hoped.