I was given the Night Angel series as a friend to read. I had never heard of it or Brent Weeks before. The concept, a story about a magical assassin, sounded interesting. Being magical would certainly make you a better than average killer.

Spoilers galore.

The first book, “Way of the Shadows” starts with the main character as a street rat orphan kid trying to make his way in a crime invested city. He sees his chance to apprentice with the best assassin (wetboy in the books) as an escape from his terrible life on the streets. He lives under the thumb of a cruel boy named Rat. As his initiation into the life of a wetboy, Azoth/Kylar has to kill Rat, after Rat mutilates and rapes his two only friends, both kids, in the world.

Reading that paragraph the book sounds really, really dark doesn’t it? Surprisingly, it doesn’t read as dark as its subject matter suggests.  A lot of dark stuff happens but Weeks avoids graphic details. He doesn’t avoid the horrors of this kind of world but he also doesn’t relish in it.

The first book moves quickly, following Azoth as he goes from a kid on the street to an accomplished assassin apprentice with an alt ego noble named Kylar. He struggles to tap into the magic that makes his master, Durzo Blint, a wetboy rather than a mere assassin. Stronger, faster and able to blur the darkness to become almost invisible, Durzo teaches Kylar the tricks of the trade but can’t teach him to access his untapped magic.

This is one of the books strengths. It is definitely fantasy with magic but it keeps the magic on the periphery. What you do see is relatively mild until the end when the city is invaded by people from the north who have more powerful magic users. This allows the book to focus on the characters rather than lots of time dwelling on making a unique magic system.

By the end of the first book, Kylar learns the truth about his master, after killing him, gains access to magical powers and kills the big bad of the book. But he doesn’t save the city and his best friend, and next in line for the throne, Logan, is trapped in the darkest hellhole of a prison imaginable. So not the happiest of endings.

The second book, “Shadow’s Edge” follows up on this and sees Kylar trying to leave the life of an assassin behind until he learns Logan wasn’t killed in the invasion and endeavors to rescue him. The world starts to expand as we learn some about the neighboring kingdoms interested in Ceneria‘s invasion.

It’s not as strong as the first book but most problems are the ones inherent in being a middle book. It expands the world at a reasonable pace, introducing the reader to a bigger picture of the world. It does this while having a definite arc to its own story and exciting conclusion.

Then book three goes and stumbles over the finish line. As a writer, I can see exactly what happened here. Weeks had an entire world built and an epic story planned. He told the first two stories but they didn’t quite get him where he needed to be to get to the ending he had envisioned in book three. He had two options then. Write more than three books, aka the Wheel of Time route. Or change the scope of his ending to fit the story he had told so far.

Instead, he chose the make the square story fit in the round books hole route. The first half of book three, “Beyond the Shadows”, is okay. Paced about the same as the other books but had a lot of more divergence. We end up following these three magic users, which have been there since the beginning but only appearing for a chapter or two in a book, a lot more in book three. Kylar takes a definite sideline. That’s not bad in and of itself, but it’s just set up for what’s to come.

The final portion of the book is essentially a narrative summary of an epic ending. Lots of stuff happens. It happens very quickly. And without being earned. All the “good guys” meet to form a grand coalition against the evil empire from the north. But we don’t know many of them well and its an amazing coincidence that they all just show up here at the same time.

There were several good stories here. Dorian’s especially would have made a great plot to follow across the longer series. A good guy who turned away from his evil godking father, then gives up his prophetic visions in order to avoid going mad, only to wind up the ruler of his sadistic homeland. While trying to avoid the evilness of his father, he begins to make small compromise after compromise to become that which he hated.

It’s a great concept that falters a bit at the end. But it should have been its whole own plot. Instead of shoehorned into book three along with several other plotlines. And then rushed together for an ending none of them earned. I could barely be bothered to finish reading the ending. I had stopped caring about what was going on.

Overall, the books were quite good. There’s some issues with how women and sex are treated. It’s hard to determine if those are Weeks failings or a symptom of the dark style of world the books exist in. Plus, it’s not really disturbing until the end when everything is rushed and feels very summarized.  So I‘m going to leave it as a note of concern and leave it to anyone who reads it to see how the feel about it.

The first book is a good read and the second works as a good enough follow-up and conclusion. There are some unresolved plotlines if you never read book three but you could be satisfied with the ending of two.