Reviewed: "Kushiel's Justice" by Jacqueline Carey

I started reading this series quite some time ago - I bought the first one when it was published in paper back. This is the fifth book in the series and, while not as epic as the others, I liked this story, too.

In fact, the past two stories just haven't had the excitement as the previous three books. But they're still good. The story moves along quite nicely, although I found myself skimming lots of pages when they were just traveling to where they need to go.

This book also had more sex in it than any others. Normally I frown on writing porn (because it's just too easy to do and does nothing in terms of forwarding the plot), but I feel the sex in this story was really needed to explain how certain character dynamics changed. The sex made the transformation believable.

There as a minimal amount of supernatural stuff in this one, too. It's funny. I actually like my fantasy at a bare minimum. Carey's novels does this fairly well. There are no magical beings that will pop out and automatically fix a problem. Her characters really struggle.

I didn't like the overt Christianity/Jewish theme to this book, though. It was just a little too much for the story and made the story drag in places.

All in all, the third trilogy isn't as good as the first, but Carey is still doing a great job with her storytelling and I look forward to her sixth installment in this series.