The Winners

This one definitely felt a lot slower with a lot of recap/rehashing.  The foreshadowing and teases were less emphatic or intriguing and what felt like longer chapters might have effected the pace more than prior books.  Seems like there was a lot of filler this time around and too much time is spent in the first half(!) around ‘the storm'. Can appreciate the dichotomy of the third books' dynamic between the two towns, despite it seeming to come out of the blue, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere for over 200 pages and this time the foreshadowing that worked so well in the first two books is somewhat confusing.  At times, it reads a bit like a 700 page epilogue for many of these characters and its unclear what the point of a couple of the new ones are in this story until the very end, including one key character that is introduced in the last 15% of the tale.  Even one of the incidents in the final leg that a reader would think it's all been building towards seems to pull it's punches. However, the big tie-in and resolution around a new character in the final 50 pages, one that started like a slight replay of prior plot devices, ends up being a great ending and the best stretch of the book.