Easily the weakest of the trilogy. For me, it DRAGGED for the first 300 or so pages & then it seemed to try to pack too many events & too much time into too little for the rest of the book. Admittedly I struggled with this one. The stories felt cliched & verged on being soap operatic instead of richly drawn as they did in the first 2 books. This trilogy was an ambitious undertaking, perhaps too ambitious, even for someone as gifted & adept as Follett.