To say that Assassin‘s Quest is a bad book would be wrong. It is well quite written. The story flows well. The plot seems predictable at times, but caught me off guard with twists at major junctures. The major characters, though some are annoying, seem fairly fleshed out and each has a reasonable back story and motivations.
Hobb does a good job of connecting with the user on an emotional level in the previous books and this one is no different. As the characters progress through their quest, I felt that I could relate to the feeling. The desire to complete ones task, no matter the cost, resonates prominently throughout the final act of the book. At a major juncture in the book, a character was forced to give up his passions and emotions to power an ultimate spell. To me, the moment resonated as Hobb doing the same for this book.
My biggest objection with the book is not even with the book itself, it is with the series as a whole. It feels like every book is trying to take a plot in a new direction. It is not that the plots do not flow into each other, they do, it is just that each of the books in the series presents the protagonist does a radical turn in terms of characterization. In the first book he is an assassin trainee and the series looks to focus on the stealth and politics of his profession. In the second book, the main character becomes a valiant warrior, defending his motherland from threats both external and internal and fighting for love and honor. In the last book, the protagonist is reduced to a single rogue agent with no purpose, no direction, few natural talents, and a single minded devotion to the task that he is set upon. In many ways, the books do not feel consistent between each other in term of plot direction, like the author who wrote each of them was in a different mental state than the author who wrote the previous.
The series also has some issues defining the central conflict and getting good pacing. The major conflict that drove the other two books and should have been the focus of this book is treated as a secondary one and relegated to the final half of the last chapter. The problem that the characters encounter in the climax, the one that the plot should be building to, is a secondary one. Until just before the climax, the problem seemed to me to be nothing more than just a tool to stretch out the plot and develop the characters. It is not that the major conflict is not mentioned often, it is more that the characters for the most part do not seem to care about it until they are near the finish line. Most characters are simply doing it out of duty and have other quests that they are working towards. If anything, the main conflict is just a hurdle that the characters have to overcome before they can move on to what they really want to do and what drives them. Unfortunately, by the time that the quest is over and done, there is almost no book left and the author includes a scant few pages about how they did. This is unfortunate since the secondary problems are not only more interesting to the characters, but they are also more interesting to the reader. These are the life and world changing conflicts that the reader wants to read about, it is not that the major conflict was not important, it was, it is just that it is not as exiting and interesting as the secondary ones that are never addressed.
Overall, the book is well written, but the plot is badly paced and creates and concludes owing the reader resolution to a number of plot threads that it must scramble in the end to finish.
