also a little bit of a disappointment. Follow along here, please. First, this is another great read from one of the most reliable authors around. It's fully as gripping, engaging, and entertaining as any of the past Repairman Jack novels. Jack is still creative in dealing with powerful enemies. He relies on his friend Abe, uses his wits, rolls with unexpected events, and sticks up for the people in his charge even when he's frustrated with them. He also wrestles with the personal changes he is undergoing as an inevitable byproduct of being the Heir to Glaeken. There are a few moments of real humanity, which I thought were well-handled. And Wilson has been elaborating on the back story and putting in various plot threads for some time now. Most of them get paid off in this volume, usually in a pretty satisfying way. So all of that is the great part. I enjoyed the book all the way to about the last 10 pages. A really satisfying read. The disappointment part is that, because Nightworld is coming, the book pretty much had to do certain things at the end, and that was a letdown to me. It's not Wilson's fault, nor a discredit to his achievement. Rather, it's the inevitable consequence of writing the entire series as a sort of "middle-quel" long after The Tomb and Nightworld had already been produced. We have known for a long time how the story began and ended. These books had to remain