The series started out strong and there was an obvious path the writer was going for. The books have a set formula and style that has worked so far, and we were getting to a breaking point. At some point, story lines had to resolve, he can’t just continue to add more and more issues that never get resolved. So the doomsday title, the shift from a white cover to black, and an obvious coming together of friends and foes that has been building for 7 books made this a wonderful time to resolve some of the storylines. But now, we have 1 partially resolved story line and 4 new story hooks that I kind of hope are ret-conned in the intro to the next book so the story doesn’t get even more complicated than it already is. Hell, there is a character that shows up an hour before the book ends; I know that she was introduced in a previous book and that she is “important”, but I can remember anything about her or how she tied into the storyline. And she just literally drops out of sneak in the middle of the final confrontation, how did she get there? How did no one else see her? Why should I care if she wasn’t in the rest of the book? She is the worst version of a deus ex machina, cause she doesn’t even solve the problem in the end.