I'm sorry. I really wanted to like this series. It sounded great. I like long, involved, epics, but it just didn't live up to any of my expectations. In fact, it was miserable to read. After a couple thousand pages and nearly two months living with these characters I never really cared what happened to anyone expect maybe Orlando, Fredericks, and Sellers. There's way too much description of minor characters, plot elements, stories, and settings that never pays off. Much of the stories seem simply repetitive. They're just doing the same thing in a new setting. Then towards the end of the last volume Williams suddenly backfills the story with a couple hundred pages of new things that have never been addressed so far just to bring the story to some kind of conclusion.
This is a great conclusion to the first trilogy of Black Company books. It's perhaps the strongest of the three.
A good start to this series. I look forward to more. I think Cook could have fleshed it out a little more, but maybe that's based on the expectations of modern fantasy epics. If you've read Stephen Erikson's Malazan series Cook's influence is very clear.
After reading Seeker this was seriously disappointing. The idea sounds great but it reads like a bad made for TV mini-series.
