Review: Review of 'The Ties that Bind' trilogy
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 12, 2013
I like starting to read trilogy when all three books are available. Got them, read them... and was left with a feeling that there will be another book to follow.Each book in 'The Ties that Bind' have its own mini-conclusion, what the trilogy does not have is a coherent wrap up in the end. Just too many sub-plots have been introduced and then left hanging.Lots and lots of violence. Stealing and liberal swearing are such a trifling crimes compered to murders, rapes and torture described in the trilogy. Certainly not for the faint hearted!One reviewer found swearing very offensive but didn't mentioned how an act of killing an innocent child, if that child happened to be in a wrong place at the wrong time, made them feel? Anyway, swearing mainly used by uneducated thug Black Thorn and its less then you may hear in some rappers songs. There is some of it in book 1, lots in book 2  since he is the leading character in it, and drops of in third book which is mainly about the Witch Hunter again.You will not find a 'good' characters in this trilogy. They are amoral survivors at best and murderers with their own set of rules at worst. There is very little to like about those characters and even less to sympathise with or relate to. Violence is raw and very descriptive, related to the reader in a somewhat numb and indifferent way.But, with a morbid fascination of a rubbernecker at a fatal car crash, I read on. I just had to know how would they survive next, who finds redemption and who will be put out of their misery.The world building part of the book is a mishmash of familiar stories taken from different histories, cultures, myth and told in a new way: Inquisition in Spain had been given magical twist, 'wild west' is call Wilds and have crocodiles and 'laughing dogs', asiatic Empire with living dragons (just a big flying lizards with bad breath!), slavery is a given thing.On a funny note: in the first book there is a generous use of word "skipping" which mysteriously disappeared in the following ones!