Triad of Being : 3 : The Light-Field product reviews

When I see something like "Triad of Being" on a book by an author with a string history of trilogies, I immediately think Book 3 is going to wrap things up... to find this ending with a doozy of a cliff-hanger has left me somewhat confused, and feeling like I am hanging in the air waiting to find out if gravity is going to work, or take a day off and leave me hanging.

Because of the time-travel aspect of this plot, it might be a good idea to go back and re-read the last few chapters of Book 2 just to get yourself back up to speed - I can usually pick up where I left off, even after a year, but in this case I soon found myself foundering for some plot traction, so had to jump back and skim a few dozen pages of the previous title just to renew the 'world' in my head. I strongly advise you do this too, just to be sure.

This instalment takes the world we came to know from Book 1 and Book 2 and turns it on it's head, with Taren's new-found ability to teleport across the time dimension giving us the good old-fashioned "Grandfather Paradox" with a twist... and such a twist as only a top-flight author would have dreamed up and managed to pull off without sounding like a novice hack. There is way more than meets the eye, when it comes to these characters, and their parallel immortal selves in the 'next dimension over'.

Something that really surprised me though - the device mentioned in the blurb is made to sound like a doomsday weapon, yet it plays such a small, almost insignificant, part in the story I found myself wondering if I had skipped a few chapters by accident somewhere. Other matters seem to take up a far larger portion of the plot development, with the photon-camera making somewhat of a cameo appearance a few times throughout, and even then it seems to be hardly more effective a weapon of mass detection than a thermal camera would be in a sauna room. None the less, it does fit into the plot in a somewhat secondary capacity, so do expect it to pop up here and there, and have some interesting plot-tangents linked to it.

Overall, this book, while still a great read, was quite a bit more convoluted and hard to follow. I didn't actually enjoy it as much as the previous books in the series, and it looks as though Traci has left it wide open to either a follow-on trilogy, or more books in the same saga-span. Maybe this "trilogy" with end up a "quadrilogy" or a "pentology" if she can hold it together better. As with all temporal paradox or parallel dimensional plots, this is going to be tough to keep on track... but when both are combined... I can see trouble on the horizon unless Traci knuckles down and streamlines the plot a bit more. Less (convolution) is More (enjoyment) should be the mantra, moving forward.