A review by atagarev
First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher

2.0

A very disappointing ending to an otherwise mostly enjoyable series. This book ended up having to tie up an awful lot of loose ends and while it technically gave us answers to the big questions set up in the series (

Spoiler

What are furies? What caused the Vord? Who killed Septimus?

etc.) almost all of them felt rushed and unsatisfying. In fact every "big" reveal was a character just saying or realizing something then the action has moved on to a different topic by the next paragraph. There were a few cases where the reveal was treated with a bit more respect but I would say this rush was a pervading issue with the whole book.

Similarly there was a lot of foreshadowing and set up that was supposed to pay off in this final installment but most of these things were either not sufficiently set up or just rushed (e.g.

Spoiler

Garados turning out to be a Great Fury was technically set up but we don't know enough about Great Furies to really know what that means or why it should be a surprise. On the flip side, Attis bluffing about taming powerful wild furies is unnecessarily complex when taming furies isn't something that hadn't even been established as a thing until that very scene.

) In short, the book has too much ground to cover and loose ends to tie up which prevents it from doing effective build up and pay off or having a satisfactorily structured narrative.