Picking up fast where The Stormcaller left off, The Twilight Herald leaps off into a whole new direction. Evil, it seems, has begun to converge on the city of Scree. So too have the good guys, jostling for elbow room in their attempt to identify what it is the evil evil is up to, and how best to, well, slaughter it.

This book goes in a new direction in more ways than one. Alas, the frenzied pace of the previous book isn’t present, and instead Mister Lloyd went with an attemp to invoke a major amount of intrigue and plot. It was almost as if the first book was the action book, and this book was the plot book to explain the action of the first. Which, actually, is a bit of a letdown for me. I was enjoying the pace and action of the first. Also upped in the second, is the presence of vampires (a bit too trendy these days, but Mister Lloyd’s version is palatable I assure you) and the crystal skulls of power are obviously becoming the collectible items everyone needs to be doombringer of the world.

Again, I am overpowered by Mister Lloyd’s ability to make the banal fantasy staples and turn them into freshly displayed produce. It shows his absolute respect for the genre, and his skill to adapt anything to suit his needs.

The finale is worth waiting for, but I am a little disappointed by the blurring of the characters in this book. Where Isak was the obvious focus of the first novel, he pretty much gets backgrounded for most of the novel and his character is fast becoming a little too “Rand” for me (in a bad sense) – with all his friends being focussed on making sure he’s got a “heart” and can “smile sometimes.” The powerful figure of the first novel is forgotten as he seems to be more a man who can sometimes whip out the goods to get stuff done, but isn’t anywhere near as thrillingly unpredictable and freakishly psychopathic as the first book. He’s turned over a new leaf and is too fast becoming a nice guy you might want to sit around and have a beer with.

Which isn’t how Mister Lloyd introduced him.

Nevertheless, it’s a tight book, and one which manages to maintain my interest enough that I was so excited to be offered the fourth book in the series and have that sitting on my desk right now waiting for me to finish the third. By no means a disappointing book, I can see Mister Lloyd has pulled a fast one and gone from trying to write a fast-moving action-focussed fantasy romp to writing an epic at half the page-cost of most epic-writing fantasy authors. Is it a good thing?

I’ll be able to tell you, soon…