Powerful healer Avry knows hardship and trouble. She fought the plague and survived. She took on King Tohon and defeated him. But now her heart-mate, Kerrick, is missing, and Avry fears he's gone forever. But there's a more immediate threat. The Skeleton King plots to claim the Fifteen Realms for his own. With armies in disarray and the dead not staying down, Avry's healing powers are needed now more than ever. Torn between love and loyalty, Avry must choose her path carefully. For the future of her world depends on her decision...

Taste of Darkness is the third book in a fantasy trilogy by Maria V. Snyder. The above synopsis was taken from the book's jacket. This is not normally something I would do, but having not read the first two books, I’m not sure that I was more enlightened as to what was going on by the end of the third.

This is a strange book, it certainly does not work as a stand-alone novel, and Snyder follows on from the end of book two with little or no desire to get new readers up to date with what is happening. The book contains no map so both the locations and characters are difficult to place in any sort of context. This sense of vacancy is not helped by the almost complete lack of description of people and places, all the conversations happen in one form of vacuum or another.

There is a further problem with the book. Looking at the cover, at what I presume is Avry, she looks around about twenty to twenty-five, however Snyder writes her as if she is fourteen to sixteen, her language peppered with words like "Gee" and "okeydokey", that is when she is not getting "pissed off" or "pissy" and she’s not the only character who speaks less like a character from a fantasy novel and more like some mid-western American teenager. I couldn’t make my mind up whether the book was written about a bunch of teens or written for that audience.

No doubt the books have an audience, otherwise there would be little reason to publish them and they may even be devoted and appreciative of the tale, but as a bit of an outsider I found the whole thing heavy going. Not helped by the fact there was little I liked about the main characters. The book's concentration on them meant that the background characters were just that, either ill-defined or there to be served up as cannon fodder.

This is most definitely one for the fans.

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Charles Packer