What a pity. I guess the author/publisher wanted to pump some more installments into the story so here we have an intermission book. Anything significant happens in the very last pages. The main characters don't grow, and neither do the new ones. There is a stab at King's Landing-style intrigue, which unfortunately falls flat. The world is still exciting and I guess the author did listen to the complaints about all the embarrassingly gratuitous sex in the previous book, so that we're at least saved from that. But the biggest flaw is the boring battle scenes. I'm probably not exaggerating that a good fourth of the book is wasted on fighting. Sign of the lack of substance? I'll still follow the series to the end--too late to turn back now--but this was a disappointment.