Terry Goodkind - The Law of Nines

I finally got around to reading The Law of Nines after finishing the Sword of Truth series a few years ago. I thought it might be worth reading since it made the New York Times best-seller list. Blurbs I had read led me to believe it was a change from his fantasy stuff, being a mystery/thriller, perhaps more occult than fantasy-related. I was wrong in both cases. It was neither a change from his fantasies nor was it worth reading.

The book takes place 1000 years after the last book of SOT and in our mundane world where Richard Rahl had sent the anti-magic people from his world. The hero Alexander Rahl, the last surviving member of the House of Rahl, meets a gorgeous blonde from another world and together they battle assassins that spy through mirrors and can appear and disappear at will. They flee while trying to solve the mystery of why evil anti-freedom forces are out to kill and/or control him.

Spaced in between fairly interesting action scenes and a wooden love story we get thinly disguised libertarian lectures. After a 2nd amendment diatribe about how horrible it is that people can't carry concealed weapons I was reminded of Faith of the Fallen, a nightmare welfare state where the most talented and productive people are reviled. It looks like Goodkind has decided that good and evil is arbitrary and the important battle is the one between left and right.

Goodkind was never a master craftsman when it came to prose, but as a pretty good storyteller, he's managed to produce a book that you can speed through pretty quickly. When he latched on to the idea of writing a fantasy series in parallel to the superior Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan he came up with a winning formula. While waiting for the next WOT book to come out a SOT book was a good way to fill the time. Now that he is trying to stand out on his own there is nothing to hide his mediocrity.

As a matter of fact this book is bad compared to SOT. The overuse of tired cliches, awkward run-on sentences, and dialog that runs on and on and yet adds nothing to the story is evidence that either Goodkind is coasting. He needs an editor that will either fix his mistakes or call him out on sub-par writing.

The title comes from the fact that he inherits a crucial piece of land at age 27. Two plus seven is nine; three nines are twenty-seven. That's it, some facile numerology.

If you read all of Sword of Truth then you may as well breeze through this in a few hours . Otherwise give it a pass. There are a lot of great fantasy writers out there who deserve your time.