Shards of a Broken Crown by Raymond Feist

The final book in Feist’s Serpentwar Saga, unless there are more that I have overlooked. Like all of Feist’s novels, the story is incredibly tacky yet somehow enjoyable to read. There is a confusing jumble of place names and character names and story arcs, as well as a lot of implied back story that somehow I wasn’t that interested in trying to discover, and as always in such stories, magic introduces complications and implausibilities. Feist’s wizard characters are so apparently powerful that one wonders why they couldn’t have saved the world on the very first page, and I think the story would have been more compelling if he had left them out. But, you can’t have fantasy without magic, right? And there is even a dragon thrown in for good measure. The not so fantastic characters and story threads were actually the most interesting; Feist might be a halfway decent writer if he wouldn’t stray so much into the wildly fantastic, but this is a pretty good cheeseburger novel nonetheless.