Shadow Lingers
Moving on to book 2 of the first set of books of the black company and you realize that the genius of Glen Cook is his ability to bring disparate threads together. The book starts off with you in a completely different city with a completely different crew of people, with the only common thread that Raven from the first book is here. You do get the rest of the black company, but the book flip flops constantly between the two perspectives until they finally meet.
You get the perspective of a Marron Shed here, someone who starts off basically being afraid of his own shadow, and being so afraid of everything, but with a strong desire to live. His path starts off with you feeling sorry for this pathetic human being, then slowly starting to understand his viewpoints and then eventually, even slightly rooting for him.
Glen cook does not write simplistic black and white persons. Every one of his characters is mostly in the grey.
You do get more machinations of the Black Company, but on a very small squad level and you get more of the investigational sort of story rather than just small scale tactics or large scale brawls that you got in the first book. The story moves along very fast, and even parts that seems disconnected starts to connect themselves.
The big bad of this book is the Dominator, the husband of the Lady, and his schemes to come back from being trapped. He has some very clever schemes that were fortunately found out a little too early. Some explanations as to why in a few hundred years, nothing happened, but it doesn’t really pass the smell test. The best explanation for why he hasn’t managed to succeed is best described as “otherwise the heroes and anti-heroes of the books woudn’t be able to thwart him”.
In any case, its a very satisfying continuation of the Black Company. Some humor accompanied by a lot of dark things that happen to folks.
Still very high recommended.