Of the "Chaos War" novels, I find this one the best one so far. Douglas Niles did a better job here than in "The Last Thane" at making it an exciting story, full of political intrigues, and family ties and so on.

What's also a nice change in style, in my opinion, is telling the story as a flashback. At the end of each chapter there's the three characters - Samar, warrior-mage and assistant of Alhana (exiled queen of Qualinesti), Silvanoshei (son of exiled Speaker Of The Sun Porthios and Alhana), and the green dragon Aerensianic, who gives his account of what happened - discussing things.

It also seems the Dark Knights aren't that cruel after all, or rather, the Chaos War doesn't really allow for the classic conquering and ruling. All have to join forces to avoid being killed themselves by Chaos's evil creatures(fire dragons, shadow wights, shape-shifting creatures, ...).

The only way to destroy them is by using weapons blessed by the gods (or with dragon magic), and those weapons are few in number compared to the masses of elves.

Again, "The Puppet King" is the best one so far, also in that it somehow rekindles my reading interest in Dragonlance novels, whereas the previous reads were rather mediocre. ( )