Exile's Return, by Raymond Feist

Awesome turn of the tide. This was by far the best book in the Conclave of Shadows trilogy and signals the reader that good old Feist can still deliver stories with the flair and the excitement of the original Riftwar Saga. What threw me off in the beginning was to discover that the point of view in this book belongs not to Tal, the protagonist of the first two volumes, but to Kaspar of Olasko. I really wasn't ready for that and in spite of a small feeling of disorientation in the beginning, this turned out to be an incredible read which further developed the storyline in a very clever and interesting way.

Kaspar starts out somewhere in the desert, in the continent of Novindus. After being abandoned there for his crimes, he undergoes some change of spirits as he lives for the day among ordinary, struggling peasants. He soon becomes a survivor, fighting for his subsistence. Until he comes in contact with a small bunch of brigands carrying a magical artifact. In the course of dealing with this finding, he crosses the continent visiting temples and seeking help from divinities. Eventually, the plot spreads out and puts him in the context of earlier, loved characters from Feist's universe. The artifact is the precursor of a greater evil to come to Midkemia and warrior and magic-users must team up to understand this threat and fight it.

The book ends without really ending and links directly into Feist's new Darkwar Saga. If there was any flaw with the Conclave of Shadows, I would say that it was its organization for the obvious sake of marketing. It seems that fantasy readers are used to trilogies and expect books to be packaged as such. The Conclave of Shadows appears to have been written in this volume for this reason alone. In all honesty, this is not a self-contained story and I understand that not every author aspires to be a Robert Jordan writing a story that spans a dozen volumes. As much as I enjoyed reading it, I would have enjoyed finding some kind of resolution when I turned the last page of Exile's Return. What I discovered was that the beat goes on and if I want to see what happens, I must go on reading. Fine by me, I enjoy Feist anyway, but a trilogy, this Conclave of Shadows really was not.