Water Sleeps (The Chronicles of the Black Company #9)

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Title: Water Sleeps
Series: The Chronicles of the Black Company
Author: Glen Cook
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SFF
Pages: 480
Format: Kindle digital edition

Synopsis:

15-20 years after the end of She is the Darkness. The Black Company has been reduced to being a gang under the leadership of Murgen's wife and Sleepy, Murgen's apprentice. Sleepy's goal is to get to the Glittering Plain and free the Black Company, get revenge on those who put them there and to kill Lady's sister. But the Company as a gang is a mere shadow of the Company as a Military Company.
But as has been shown in previous books, even Shadows have teeth. And Sleepy takes the Company, present and past, to a place that even Croaker couldn't imagine.

My Thoughts:

The devolving of the Black Company continues. It was sad to see. The two feuding mages, getting old, having a stroke? A military company reduced to a straggling, struggling ragamuffin group of neerdowells. Yet this was just as compelling a story as the previous ones. Cook does a fantastic job of showing a real face in a fantasy world.

I liked Sleepy better than Murgen as a narrator but I suspect more of that had to do with my dislike of Murgen's out of body, through time, traveling. Being in one place and one time was rather refreshing.

The ending was pretty obvious and would have actually been a pretty good end to the series. There is one more book so I'm looking forward to seeing how Cook "really" wraps things up.
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