I enjoyed 'The Troll King', which works very well as a standalone novel. I enjoyed 'The Troll Queen' too, even though it seems pretty clear that Vornholt only wrote it after 'The Troll King' proved to be a big success. It finds that elusive balance of working as a novel of its own but also as a sequel. This third book was clearly conjured up at the same time as the second and it's enjoyable enough, but it doesn't find as seamless a flow as well as its predecessors. It's at once the most frantic and least focused of the three and it relies far more on what has gone before. It's very much the third book in a trilogy and wouldn't stand well alone.

Here's a quick recap for those who don't want to go back to re-read my reviews of the earlier two books. There's a Great Chasm with dark on one side and light on the other. On the dark side is the land of Bonespittle, which is populated by trolls, ogres and ghouls, ruled by a despotic sorcerer by the name of Stygius Rex. The light side is the Bonny Woods, which is full of fairies and elves and is theoretically a much happier place. Needless to say, the two sides have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, until Stygius Rex decides that he wants to build a bridge over the Great Chasm.

Our hero is a troll called Rollo, who is a little unusual even before he proves rather good at flying. He manages to depose Stygius Rex and is clearly destined to become the new ruler of Bonespittle, except that he doesn't want the job. He made friends with a fairy called Clipper in the first novel, but she died and he sets out to return her body to her people in the second. His girlfriend Ludicra mounts an expedition to bring him back, because Bonespittle is falling apart without a leader and she grows into a heroine by the end of that book too.

The future seems assured if only the characters can get to it but the path is complicated by quite a lot of stubborn details. For one, Clipper has been brought back to life but she came back wrong and is now very much a bad guy. As a bad guy, she also brought back Stygius Rex, so he's up to his old tricks again. And, as the title ably suggests, everyone knows that there's an ancient treasure that was lost somewhere in the Great Chasm, which happily now serves as this novel's MacGuffin. And that's where we come in.

We start out at the bottom of the Great Chasm, with our collection of heroes ready to climb back up the staircase Ludicra's party climbed down last time out. Unfortunately Stygius Rex is waiting for them, with Clipper and fireballs and hostages. He has Krunkle, the great troll bridge builder, and Rollo and Crawfleece's dad, Nulneck. Therefore he has the high ground and issues the precise ultimatum we expect: bring him the treasure within two days or his hostages will pay the price for failure. The good news is that there are three highly convenient elves who believe they've found the treasure and one of them owes his life to Ludicra.

The obvious assumption at this point is that everyone on both sides of the Great Chasm will team-up happily to retrieve the treasure, nullify the threat of Stygius Rex and move forward into a harmonious future in which troll and fairy can get along like a house on fire. And, while some of that comes to pass, not all of it does and very little of it happens in the way we might expect. John Vornholt gleefully keeps us on the hop throughout. And that's largely a good thing, but he throws so much at the wall in this one that a lot of it fails to stick.

The best aspects come down to teamwork. Trolls and elves do find ways to work together, even if neither side ever fully trusts the other and any alliances made are flimsy ones. Just as Ludicra, an annoying waste of space early in the first book, comes into her own during the second, quite a few supporting characters prove their worthiness in this one. Filbum, especially, who's now very much an item with Rollo's sister Crawfleece, grows so well that the book could easily have been named for him, if a suitable phrase could have been found. 'The Troll King's Brother-in-Law' doesn't have much of a ring to it. Maybe he should settle for being able to punch Stygius Rex. Twice.

The worst aspects come down to convenience. The worst example is the fact that elves, who have been seeking this treasure for a very long time indeed, suddenly find it at the exact moment that it becomes even more important, but it isn't the only one. There's a portal that goes just where it needs to go and that rang pretty cheap too. I much preferred characters making something of the things around them, like how Rollo and Filbum figure out how to turn a near calamity into a boon. There's convenience there too, but it's absolutely acceptable because the presence of something that doesn't do anything until characters adapt it to their need works for me. Something merely being there to stumble onto exactly when it's needed doesn't.

Also, new characters show up too whenever the story needs them, even if it goes against accepted wisdom passed down in the earlier two books. It doesn't help that one of these characters is called Batmole, which prompted me to imagine a weird crossover between the 'Batman' TV series of the sixties and 'Danger Mouse', with Morocco Mole taking over from Bruce Wayne for a while. What's more, there are dragons here, for the first time, and I can't remember another fantasy novel with dragons that under-utilised them so obviously. Old Belch, Stygius Rex's giant toad, is given about as much to do and I can't remember if he's in the book past the first chapter.

In between are a whole slew of moments. There are wonderful moments in the first two books, too; but they fit within a wonderful sweep. Here, they remain moments. I can't really talk about most of them because they would constitute spoilers but there's one in particular that resonated with me. This whole trilogy is very much about good guys and bad guys; with both being highly defined, even if there's a lesson here about we shouldn't judge anybody by their looks. Trolls can be heroes and fairies can be villains. However, Vornholt introduces a corrupting influence that neatly blurs that definition between good and bad. To be fair, it's been there all along but he explains it here and, while that could have gone horribly wrong, I think it went wonderfully right.

And so this is an enjoyable enough book to wrap up a trilogy, but it doesn't flow anywhere near as well as its two predecessors. It feels flimsier and less substantial, ironically mirroring the lack of maintenance being done on the bridges in Bonespittle, but it makes up for some of that in sheer fun. I like these characters and I like how Vornholt makes them grow. The best grow a little more here and the worst grow a lot. So, thanks, John, for bringing me an ARC of this so I could read the whole trilogy. Now I have to wonder why you haven't written more original work for children. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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