Dead stall... . Warning spoilers...    In the worst installment of a bad series, Fitzchivalry wont die.  Perhaps the most interesting plot point of this whole contrived series is wasted entirely.  Fitz, who died, and rose again has his potentially interesting ordeal descrobed in perhaps the most boring way possible.  I supposed his dead body was infused with both wolf personality and human for a while (I guess souls mix when they are contained in a tiny brain), and of course the seizures.  Seizures trouble Fitz for a while, as long as they are convenient to the plot, and then, of course, they totally vanish.  While I found it really interesting that Fitz used to be dead, and the ramifications of that, we find that there are no ramifications whatsoever, except for a brief period of eliminate-the-wolf-behavior rehab.  I mean, he was reanimated after a period of time, but that's no big deal I guess.    Robin Hobb is such a good story teller, but she is horrible at plot.  Except in the Liveship traders series, but she must have written that one entirely differently, because you can't tell that this is the same author.  What she is good at is writing loveable characters, and slowly feeding you tidbits of knowledge about interesting things as the characters "learn" about them.  In other words she can "feed the fire" of the story well to keep interest.      But that doesn't mean she does it consistently, and this book is a great example of how even Hobb can utterly fail.    Robin relys solely on you LOVING the characters (which I feel she herself does) and she allows that to distract you from reasonable pacing.  This book starts out slow, then begins the ending phase of the master plot, and slowly slowly slowly panders through that and then ends in a rush.  Not to mention the fact that she knows nothing about plausibility.  This whole series is based on a character that is as loveable as your little brother, yet supposedly kills without compunction.  You know, an assassin.      This series asks people a simple question.  How would you describe an assassin?  Prior to reading this series you might say ruthless, cold, cruel, at best disaffected and callous.  Crafty certainly.  After reading this book, you would say, kind, affectionate, and loves dogs?  Add to that loyal to himself first, good natured, well liked, and an advisor to royalty?  So is Robin Hobb rethinking the role of an assassin?  No, you can't do that.  An assassin is an assassin.  You can't change that FACT.  No, she's creating a hero who was trained as an assassin, but who only functions as an assassin very very very few times at all, since that is a nasty business.  As kind and good natured as Fitz is, he never once questions the morality of killing someone because he was told in the weighty manner such a question deserves.  He never is actually put to any test.  So, Robin creates a hero, calls him an assassin, and swings the plot around to have him doing everying imaginable EXCEPT functioning as a cold-hearted killer.  He's a spy, a soldier, a telepathy partner, a wolf-buddy, and for some reason everyone just thinks he ought to be the hero.  When everything comes together, everyone just says Fitz, be the hero.  For no good reason at all (because you have telepathy does that make you the guy to go to?).  [...]  Perhaps Robin thought the weirdness of the ending scenes would add a sort of tension, and of course, they were being persued, and so I guess that added drama.  But of course, the main threat, the "forged ones" were not really a threat anymore, but of course, you still have to resolve that issue, and was neatly done in the end.  But I felt the whole story, the drama of the "forged ones" really wasn't so dramatic, and I just don't get what caused them to behave just like they did.  On a fantasy scale, it was new, but not very interesting.  Robin does much better with dragons in the Liveship traders, and these dragons are just stupid.  And Verity-as-dragon is perhaps the dumbest of all.  Over all a slow build up for an overall letdown.    If I began Robin Hobb with this series, I would have never read her again.  I am forcing myself to finish the Tawny man series now, because I WANT to like her stuff.  But I don't know if I will EVER find enough time to finish that sleeper series.    Overall, try Ship of Magic, unless you are already invested in this, and have to have closure
Output: NEG