Splat went the series

A few years ago, I read a trilogy. The first book was The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.

There were some jarring bits, but it was pretty good. As was book two. And 90% of book three. The final chapter of the last book ruined the trilogy, made the whole thing stupid and irrelevant, and, as a reader, made me feel like I'd been mocked by the author. There was no foreshadowing, no nothing, just a final chapter completely at odds with the end of of the book.

Here's the review I posted on goodreads at the time to explain my one star rating.

To give an idea... I gave 5 and 4 stars to the two previous books of this trilogy. Up to the last few chapters, this one would have gotten a solid 4 stars. It kinda went out to the weeds from time to time, but it was still a pretty good book, and looked to be wrapping most of the storyline up.

And then, blam. The ending was a WTF moment of total mess, a ridiculous clown nose added to a perfectly fine bottle of wine. That sounds weird, right? Well, so were the last few chapters.

I don't know what to say. I'd love to recommend the series, but the feeling of being let down by the author is quite overwhelming.

I just finished a quintet today, the Fever Series by Karen Marie Moning.

The books were all solid, and would have added up to a solid good series... except for the last one. It was too long, and too scattered, and really, the quintet would have been much better rewritten as a quartet, I think. I dunno. I know I was a bit 'please enough of the boring sex' (*) for a good part of book 5 (spoiler: they have sex. Lot of sex.) but it wasn't just that. It was just too long, and too many events felt like repeats without enough addition to add to the story. It got boring, because so much stuff kept happening, to the point that it almost felt like spaghetti being thrown at a wall to see what storylines would stick.

To be fair, the author wraps up all her plot points, so there is that. I mean, she used enough deus ex machina cards to make up a full tarot deck, so she damn well better have.

This is partly why I have trust issues when it comes to paranormal romance. It's usually not romance -no relationship development- but sex that usually ends up being borderline abusive, and the paranormal is often either bolted on, or just bad.

(*) When the relationship feels off, in a book with that much sex, I usually don't like the sex scenes. And this relationship felt very artificial to me. To be fair, the main character was a woman in her own right, a self-rescuing heroine, and an excellent main character.