Caine black knife

Well, the end was an unpleasant surprise compared to the two previous books. Those felt like complete adventures. This one felt like the set-up to an adventure. The "then" could be considered resolved, but "then" is not the story of the book, it's the backstory (and additional gore and rape, since the "now" does not have too much of that). Other than that, a lovely setup with the same old beloved Cain having lovely character development between "then" and "now".

After loving the first two books I thought this one was dull and way too gratuitous with the sex/violence/unpleasantness. I loved Caine/Hari/Shade/whatever in the first two books but I found him obnoxious here. Almost a self-parody. The story was really uninteresting to me for most of the book. Then the last couple dozen pages really picked up, but the book ends abruptly in the middle of the story. I'm really looking forward to the next one, because suddenly I'm interested in the direction of the story, but the vast majority of this particular book wasn't my cup of tea.