Somewhere in the midst of reading this quite dense book, it became clear to me that this wasn't really for me. It's full of a lot of things I like but I could never quite get a handle on it. The characters never quite connected with me. The story never really gripped me. The unfolding of mysteries didn't quite happen at a pace that kept me intrigued. And the fantasy elements were almost cripplingly dense. There certainly are a lot of words here but they just didn't really add up to much for me.