After attempting several times to read the abysmal Mistral's Kiss, I finally decided to skip it entirely & move onto the next book. After getting 30-50 pages into the book, I realized that I hadn't missed a single thing. (Which says loads about LKH's writing & pacing abilities!) 
 This story (like previous ones) has the action take place within one day. Merry's men have been accused of rape, so they go to meet with Taranis's lawyers (one of his people was the one who was raped) to fight the accusations. Merry also discovers a zillion new different magical powers, brings together a new sithern, gets pregnant, & brings about world peace. 
 Ok... so maybe not the last one, but you get where I'm going with this. While the book is much better than the last one, it still reads a little too much like fanfiction. The sex scenes in this book are much tamer than before, with there being fewer sex scenes & less boring description in said scenes. Even so, it's just plain BORING to read about someone who always has a magical cure or fix-it-all whenever the going gets really tough. It's also boring that everything is so "Merry Merry Merry" when there were so many interesting sub-plots that were brought up & then dropped in favor of more "Merry is awesome" & "Merry is all powerful" plotlines. Die-hard fans may like this book, but new readers will find themselves incredibly bored. They'll also feel lost, but I'm assuming that the new readers will be people who have at least a rudimentary knowlege of what has gone on before. (And sadly enough, the plot development has been so slow that the average new reader could catch up with everything by reading a wikipedia summary.)