This was by far my least favorite of the trilogy. I adored the first book, and dived right into the second. Far too much time is spent at the beginning rehashing over what happened in the first book - so much so that I put it down for two years until I didn't remember the first book so well. And then it does two things: (1) it feels like Fitz is in a never-ending, ever-deepening quagmire that he has no hope of escaping, which led to me feeling rather despondent as I read. And (2) it feels like he keeps basically having the same problems come up time and again, which just makes the whole thing even more frustrating for me.

I realized that I just really prefer my fantasy books to involve travel and different characters. For way too much of this book, Fitz is just stuck at the castle, having the same intrigues with the same handful of characters ... it's boring. To me. I realize other people could be quite happy with this.