This is one of the most coherent and vividly emotional fantasy novels I have ever read. In the first pages, the characters have been fully fleshed out; each from their position in the rising action back to their origins. Each of them behaves as I have come to expect them to from the first two books but still I was never, as I so often am when reading fiction, on the verge of prophesying the end of the cycle at the end of each chapter. Weeks wove the threads of the fates of Midcyru's kingdoms and antiheroes and demigods as carefully as one would imagine Dorian Uruul's spells. The pace of the book seems rushed at the beginning, to be honest, but just maybe that was one of my inner demons trying to mold my reading of the story into something formulaic and predictable. I can't emphasize enough how much I felt this book an improvement over and perfectly fitting conclusion to the story of the first two. There are, of course, unanswered questions; but those are not loose threads so much as evidence that Week's tortured heroes and doomed monarchs have lives extending beyond the last page. Is there a happy ending? Actually Weeks visits on almost every one of his characters a day of their lives' deepest suffering. It is, however, an almost absurdly hopeful close to a trilogy. I resent the hell out of Brent Weeks for making me suffer so much empathy for his godkings and shadowmen, but I will undoubtedly keep reading.