Book Review: When True Night Falls – Coldfire Trilogy

After the fantastic first book “Black Sun Rising”, I was very eager to read this one. And I wasn’t disappointed. It builds on the first book, keeping the two central characters – the priest Damien and the supercool anti hero Gerald Tarrant intact.

Damien is pretty much what we saw in the first book, but Gerald…we see new sides to this guy at every page turn. One thing’s for sure, this book has lots of surprises. Friedman seems extremely keen to break out of the mold of normal fantasy as she once again demonstrates the ability to kill of main characters without a moment’s notice!

This is really surprising because at one point I thought she had introduced a permanent character into the series who would play an important role. But I’m getting perilously close to a spoiler here so I’ll just leave it by saying that you have to expect the unexpected.

This is the second book of the Coldfire Trilogy with just one more to go and it ends with a cliffhanger. The villain of the series is diabolic, insanely powerful, demonical – and radiates a cold malevolence that’s all the more scary because that’s just the nature of this being. It’s not personal. It’s the way he/she is. No one comes even close to his power except for Gerald Tarrant – and Tarrant has his own priorities.

Unlike the first book, “When True Night Falls” doesn’t start off slowly. It lands us right in the middle of the story a few months after the first book left off, and we’re back in the familiar environment with new enemies and personalities. Like the first book, it has very little “fluff” – no long boring descriptions of landscapes and people’s clothes like the Wheel of Time series (though that one was in a class by itself.) Very good plot pacing.

I’ve done a bit of thinking and one of the reasons why this series isn’t as compelling as the “Wheel of Time” is that Friedman doesn’t leave plot lines hanging unlike Robert Jordan. That was a criticism of Jordan’s work, but it sure kept people coming back to the books to find the resolutions. If I had to choose, I think I would go for Friedman’s style of writing. There’s less tension, but it also makes you less involved. Different styles for different times I suppose.