The fourth House War book picks up right from the point Jewel left the narrative of the Sun Sword series. And if you haven’t read that series you will definitely end up lost here.
It and the fifth book are pretty similar in style to the better of those novels so there’s not really much to complain about with either aside from the ever-stronger parallels to the author‘s Elantra franchise. I’ve never really understood why authors will write multiple ongoing stories concurrently since they will almost inevitably bleed into one another.
Oracle being a good example. This is where things start to seriously diverge from the Sun Sword narrative and become ever more Elantran, with a heavy metaphysical focus. The other key difference with this book is that Jewel gets shunted into a tertiary role while Jester and Finch take center stage.
Once again, if the foreword is to be believed, the series finale was split into two books. The first, Firstborn, is a bait & switch. The cover and synopsis give the impression the focus will be on Carver/Ellerson, but it’s not. They have about as much page time as Jewel did in the previous entry. Instead it primarily concerns itself with Jewel’s mostly pointless metaphysical travels. Frankly, both Carver’s situation and this book in general both come across as filler. There’s not much to justify either’s existence.
With that out of the way the action finally reaches its climax in War. I can see what they were going for here, but there are so many points of view to jump between that instead of building tension it just builds exasperation. If this were to be made into a live action series you would have to do a 5-way split screen to properly ramp things up, and that’s just not possible to do (at the length this requires) in text format. That said, the end result certainly isn’t as disappointing as Sun Sword‘s; aside from the catalyst for Jewel’s decision events conclude fairly well.