Product Description

Don't miss the gripping conclusion to Salvatore's New York Times best-selling Transitions trilogy!

When the Spellplague ravages Faerûn, Drizzt and his companions are caught in the chaos. Seeking out the help of the priest Cadderly–the hero of the recently reissued series The Cleric Quintet–Drizzt finds himself facing his most powerful and elusive foe, the twisted Crenshinibon, the demonic crystal shard he believed had been destroyed years ago.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #593 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Released on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780786952335
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

The high quality once so common from Salvatore
The Ghost King completes the Transitions Trilogy, which started out quite slow and disjointed from the future scene that opened The Orc King to the more contemporary story of The Pirate King, taking place some eight years after the end of the second book in the series.

While Salvatore unites the disparate characters from his two Realms series once again, he does so more intimately, having Jarlaxle as the main focus of the antagonist's ire at the start of the book. Spanning a wide range of the canon of the Forgotten Realms, we see psionics in use, magic failing due to the spell plague, priestly magic failing as the Gods seem to have disappeared, but magic weapons and items seemingly unaffected. The story deals with the reincarnated Crystal Shard in a new guise, dissociated from the Lichs who created it in the ancient past, but united with the dragon whose breath destroyed it and a mind flayer. The three minds compete for dominance, so the foe serves as its own antagonist for some of the book.

The heroes are familiar, from the characters of the Cleric Quintet and their children, to the remaining Companions of the Hall (Wulfgar was split from them earlier in the series, for good it seems), to Jarlaxle and Athrogate. Artemis Entreri is mentioned but never seen, and it was noted that he was being hunted by the servants of the Shard so we might see another book or story featuring him in the future.

The heroes band together to face the evil, accompanied by extra-dimensional beings entering through a dimensional rift that replenishes the enemy ranks. Two of the Companions are laid low before any battle is fought and they only serve to distract the rest until their plotlines are resolved at the end of the book.

The title of the series, Transitions, reflects not only the changeover of the game system of Dungeons and Dragons, but also the changes that proceed in the lives of the primary characters as their world changes. The defeats and victories they have achieved and suffered in their lives are matched by their greatest challenge to date. The heroes show their mettle and the reader is rewarded for being patient in following the course of the action. This is not a pleasant story, as great changes are wrought both in the Forgotten Realms and in the lives of the characters we have grown to know and love. How they deal with these radical changes will have to wait to be revealed in whatever Salvatore delivers next.

Note that Salvatore has a long author's note to open the book, citing how difficult it was for him to write. It was not until the end of the book that this truly became clear to me. It is a pretty rare thing for a book to move me to tears, but this one accomplished that for the first time in a very long while. I cannot say enough good things about this book, though it did start a bit slow and some things were not explained terribly well and there were some consistency issues (such as Ivan retrieving his axe at one point, then not having it and using rocks, then suddenly having his axe again). However much I might not like such things, they are present and result in my not giving this a five star review.

This is a fantastic book that reads very fast, like the older books in the Drizzt line it is grand in scale and deals with the evolution in the life of this larger than life hero.

Disappointing
As usual, Salvatore delivers a rousing tale of swords-and-sorcery. Also as usual, unfortunately, when he pens a darker tale than the usual Drizzt fare, he doesn't exactly succeed. The closest of his previous Drizzt novels to this is probably The Legacy, though this book works considerably better in some respects to that dismal failure. It seems that whenever RAS tries to write "significant" books rather than fun ones, he comes up with plodding and leaden lectures only lifted by the depictions of swordplay and tactics.

There are certainly good points to this book. Athrogate and Pwent, both mostly annoying in previous books, not only are tolerable together, but are actually amusing. Jarlaxle continues to mature as an interesting character. Quirky minor characters come to life in ways that remind me, strangely, of the Fox TV series BONES. The action is, as always, spectacularly well-written - though this time at a higher level of power than ever before.

However, the negatives also weigh heavily. He delivers not one, but two literal dei ex machina to conclude the book; indeed, it can be argued Drizzt winds up largely a spectator in a book he is supposed to be the lead. Three major characters "die" in this book, though conveniently in ways that Salvatore can easily retrieve them in the future should he so choose (he seems to have learned that from the "death" of Wulfgar). At least two of the deaths smack heavily of plot manipulation, since a straightforward resurrection via the deus ex machina would have made more sense than the one they receive (that was a "reward" for Drizzt?).

Perhaps worst of all is his continued mistreatment of Drizzt as a character. As the previous two books showed, the adventurer who would pursue a friend's captor across the Realms in the name of justice is long gone. The new version is a navel-gazing whiner who seems never to have met evil he couldn't try to make a bargain with. Gone is the decisive do-gooder; here is the ditherer. As a result, he largely winds up mostly irrelevant to the events concluding his own story. I suspect Salvatore has gotten bored with Drizzt, seeming to prefer Jarlaxle to him; the conclusion certainly seems to point to Jarlaxle for at least the next few books.

In truth, this is probably a two-star book to anyone not heavily invested in the Icewind Dale/Canticle series of novels. For those of us who are, it's probably a must-read, though not a very welcome one.

An epic finale
I wasn't enjoying this series as much as I enjoyed most of Salvatore's work, it seemed forced to me, and then I started this book.





Spoilers- Beware--------------





First, with the Spellplague about, me and many of my friends already thought that Catti-brie would be hit with it. Well, Salvatore wastes no time in afflicting her. That is what starts the entire adventuring group prepared to take action. Then Jarlaxle and Athrogate come in (which just took me on the book- Jarlaxle is my favorite character) and they get them to join them to go to Spirit Soaring.

What got me the most was that Drizzt really stopped being an annoyingly dispassionate character. He's often so full of philosophy that he is flat. But Catti-brie's plight motivated him so that he seemed more like a person than just a cliche hero.

The killing of three characters... I think everybody suspected. It was coming throughout the entire book. You can wish it isn't true, just like the remaining characters in the book, but it is what it is.

Needless to say I was crying my eyes out by the end. My heart was broken just as much as Drizzt's was.

For anyone wondering if this book was worth it, it is. It goes to those same dark places that the Dark Elf Trilogy and the Sellswords Trilogy took us. If the beautiful cover art by Todd Lockwood isn't enough to make the purchase, then the read is. Good job, Salvatore.