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Shan's attempt to escalate his series has turned it into something completely different, and sadly one that is more predictable and much less interesting. The evocative slice-of-life scenes from the first three books are all but gone, and despite stabs at moral complexity (which were admittedly successful in the previous book) Shan's grand war plot just lacks the characterization that lent the first three books their appeal. It no longer has a unique selling point, and the structuring leaves much to be desired. Each book is half of a plot, half of a character arc, which I guess makes sense in a series, but the first three books were all relatively self-contained, so we've gone from one story told in two hundred pages to one story told across six.
