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| Shadows Return (Nightrunner) | 
 enlarge | Author: Lynn Flewelling
Publisher: Spectra
Category: Book
List Price: $7.50
Buy New: $4.07
You Save: $3.43 (46%)
New (32) Used (10) from $4.07
Avg. Customer Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 10878
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0553590081
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553590081
ASIN: 0553590081
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
With their most treacherous mission yet behind them, heroes Seregil and Alec resume their double life as dissolute nobles and master spies. But in a world of rivals and charmers, fate has a different plan.…
After their victory in Aurenen, Alec and Seregil have returned home to Rhiminee. But with most of their allies dead or exiled, it is difficult for them to settle in. Hoping for diversion, they accept an assignment that will take them back to Seregil’s homeland. En route, however, they are ambushed and separated, and both are sold into slavery. Clinging to life, Seregil is sustained only by the hope that Alec is alive.
But it is not Alec’s life his strange master wants—it is his blood. For his unique lineage is capable of producing a rare treasure, but only through a harrowing process that will test him body and soul and unwittingly entangle him and Seregil in the realm of alchemists and madmen—and an enigmatic creature that may hold their very destiny in its inhuman hands…. But will it prove to be savior or monster?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
 Very Different From Earlier Works in the Series August 12, 2008
21 out of 29 found this review helpful
Think of your favorite scenes from the first three books - Alec proving worthy of his Black Radley bow, Seregil entering the snow-covered cave in the Dravnian village, Beka leading Urgazhi turma behind enemy lines, the Rhui'Auros mystics of Aurenen. Whatever they were, you won't find them here. Instead you get Chapter 39 in "Stalking Darkness," where Alec's being tortured in the hold of a ship, only here it goes on for a full half of the book.
The first three Nightrunner books are captivating and original, like a grittier Sherlock Holmes, with just the right touch of wonder and horror to the magic of the wizards. They're also dense, packed with captivating descriptions that never bog down, and laced with insight on swordplay, archery, and various espionage skills. Anyone seeking to write fine fantasy should check them out.
With this book, though, the difference is striking. For while the book's cover is gorgeous, inside it looks like a young adult novel, and worse, it reads like one.
First, there's clumsy lines like "Peering cautiously outside, he froze as he made out a line of figures outside." Every writer makes such slips, but an editor should've caught them. What really drags it down, though, are all the interior monologues. These long summaries of what everyone is feeling. "Alec was normally the most reasonable and easygoing of men; but on this one topic he always grew troubled, though he wouldn't say much about it. All Seregil would do was avoid the subject. He made no apologies for his past, but he hated causing Alec pain." And on and on, over and over again. In the earlier books you can hardly find such meandering, and always just a sentence here and there - not full pages of lovelorn ponderings.
And where is Seregil while Alec is imprisoned? Surely he's out sleuthing, tracking down Alec to rescue him. Nope, he's in another cell. So we go from Alec being sexually groped while drugged to Seregil being sexually groped while drugged and then back again. In the first Nightrunner book, Alec is miserable in a prison cell for just one page before he's busted out, but here all you get is Alec missing Seregil and Seregil missing Alec. "Oh tali! If you were killed, because of me..." and a hundred pages later Seregil's thinking the same thing, "limp and useless, trapped in a cell with no means of escape." Two heroes trapped in prison cells doesn't make for compelling fiction.
As for the characters, Seregil and Alec have gone from hardened, wise nightrunners with a strong bond to dopey-eyed lovers acting like amateurs. Like in an opening scene, when they're sneaking out of a mansion and Seregil looks back for Alec and says, "Hey! Where are you?" And Alec says, "Shhh! They'll hear you!" Real professional. Or when passing in front of the queen's cavalry, Micum tells Seregil, "Hush, someone will hear you!" He might as well have shouted, "He's talking bad about the queen!" Why not just have him change the subject, or make one of those hand signals that were so interesting in the earlier books? Besides that moment, Micum is the only one who acts like his old self, and those scenes are good, if still not up to the earlier books.
The dialogue, as well, is thin and cliched, where it was previously one of the best parts of the series - witty, to the point, every scene holding its weight. So again, what's missing is the depth, the wonderful texture and realism of Flewelling's prose. (For a better look at the difference in style, check out a comparison I'll post in the Comments.)
I really hate to say all this, `cause I love the earlier books so, and Flewelling is a class act. I don't know what she was after here, but it's not a rewarding read.
Things do start to move at the end (even if what will happen in a battle scene is obvious before it begins), and there's also an enticing glimpse of the next book. You could actually start this book at Chapter 37, and you wouldn't miss much but the slow parts.
 Lost the previous book's complexity and balance June 29, 2008
18 out of 24 found this review helpful
First of all there is to say, buying Shadow's Return, especially if you liked the first Nightrunner Books, won't be a mistake!
It's a good read, keeps the good flow in it's writing style and is bound to entertain you.
However, there are several things I noticed that bugged me a little, though it's obviously just my opinion:
The book at first appears to be the same size as the first ones, though you'll realise the fontsize is huge. The story is far shorter, and through that, near completly loses it's complexity, the interwoven sidestories, the little things and pieces making the world alive and breathing. For the first time, there's an amount of cardboard-city-feeling, especially concerning plenimar. It's also sad plenimar is just kept to be the 'evil' country with no good whatsover (for us to see, that is).
The characters changed alot, partly in odd ways by character development between the books. Alec to me seemed very bitter, Seregil rather immature, which feels very odd to me.
There though really developed niftily, and people who like him will find themselves giggle happily.
What I disliked most about the book however, and what makes me give it only 3 stars, is the huge plot-overkill.
I always loved at the Flewelling books that they kept something I'd like to call 'fantasy realism', that is, while obviously it's fantasy, the storyline always was perfectly logic and it was the characters having to struggle their way out of problems, not some huge magic or artefact.
And especially that's different in this books. While the idea of a created magical child wasn't bad at all, it really became some Deus ex machina. People die - no matter, they'll stand up again a page later. People are attacking - no matter, they'll just fall off their saddles and die. It's just not the usual Flewelling-Quality, sadly, but rather part of the huge group of random fantasy books with omnipotent beings, evil countries and a solution that lacks all the quality of the previous Nightrunner Books.
 Some secrets are written in blood June 25, 2008
17 out of 24 found this review helpful
SHADOWS RETURN is the fourth installment of Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner series. After finishing the first three books almost nine years ago now, she has returned with a new exciting book about our two favorite nightrunners; Seregil i Rhiminee and Alec of Kerry.
Like her other books, SHADOWS RETURN starts with a small interlude to allow the readers to learn more about the two main characters, obviously meant to refreshen everybody's memories about the previous adventures of our two heroes. But even those chapters are exciting in their own way and wonderfully written.
The book quickly takes up pace when both Seregil and Alec are sent back to Aurenen by Queen Phoria to retrieve Klia. On their way towards her, they're ambushed and seperated as Zengati slavers take them along on a trip which is more hair-raising than the both of them could possibly imagine as shadows from Seregil's past start to come back and Alec learns more about his heritage and the rhui'auros' mysterious prophecy.
Shadows Return is definitely more horrifying and grotesque in it's own way than the previous books, but also far more impressive as Flewelling grows on in writing. Though nine years are between the release of TRAITOR'S MOON and SHADOWS RETURN, Flewelling has managed to get into the skins of her characters once more and write another fantastic story.
I'm sure that the next book in the series will be even better!
A beach read, unfortunately July 20, 2008
15 out of 25 found this review helpful
Many of the reviews already posted here are spot-on regarding the book's weaknesses: the surprising shallowness of the characters, the lack of plot complexity (which ties in with the novel's relative brevity), and the overkill in the use of magic. [Minor spoiler alert.....] I mean, a resurrection? When fantasy authors do that, without any hint of a downside to the process, I start to lose interest. Magic, when handled well by an author, is simply a tool much like any other, not a miracle-on-demand machine.
To this list of problems I would add one other aspect of the book that bothered me quite a bit, which was the relative insignificance of the stakes involved. In the first three Nightrunner novels, Seregil and Alec are either saving the world, or trying to steer the fate of nations in benign directions; here, they're just trying to save themselves. While that's a worthy goal, it doesn't require heroes, and their characters have been sadly diminished by the relative smallness of scope allowed them here.
I, too, hope the next installment redeems this one, but I must say that if you're a fan of the first three books, you might want to wait until the verdict is out on the next novel before wading into these waters.
What Happened? July 16, 2008
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
The Nightrunner Series has been a favorite of mine ever since the books first came out. That makes leaving this review really difficult for me, as I believe that Flewelling is a great author.
However, I hate to say it, but this book just doesn't live up to her previous work. As other reviewers have mentioned, there are a lot of little mistakes, such as what happened to Alec's father, various misspellings, and grammar issues, but these are small compared to the real issues.
Simply put this book is missing everything that made the previous books work. The sense of realism is gone, and a world that once seemed complete and full is now flat and empty feeling (someone mentioned a cardboard city). The same can be said for the characters. In the previous books I always got the impression that as much as we have seen of Alec and Seragil and the others, there was still more underneath. In this book they seemed to have been whittled down to their basic descriptions. Instead of real people they are as flat as the rest of world. In fact the whole book seemed to be lacking life, and character.
Lastly was the story. The idea didn't seem bad at first, but the execution was not so good. Honestly it seemed very contrived. I won't be specific as to which points I found especially troublesome, as that would be revealing spoilers, but let me just say that there are many places where the feel of the story is more like bad fan fiction than the normal type of work I had become used to seeing from Flewelling.
There were so many cliches that lead into seemingly contrived events, which read more like getting from point A to C via X (what and why?) than a real novel. There were plenty of occasions where the conclusions reached didn't match the action that took place, and the behavior exhibited did not seem in character or even remotely realistic.
As one other reviewer said, Flewelling's strong point had always been the ability to make a fantasy world seem logical and realistic. It was easy to suspend disbelief when reading Flewelling because her world, and her characters and their situations were all believable. When reading this book I never once was able to reach that point.
To say I was disappointed in this book is an understatement. Honestly, it made me wonder if my appreciation of the other books was due to some type of sentimentality instead of an actual representation of their quality. I am not sure if I will be purchasing the next books in this series, but perhaps I will. I just hope that Flewelling will be able to recapture the magic that seems to have been lost in this one.
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