Rating: 
Summary: Stalking Alternative Life Styles
Review: Be prepared for a book that spends a significant amount of time advocating alternative life styles.
Rating: 
Summary: i'd give more than just 5 stars...
Review: (i am not a native speaker, please overlook my style)
with the second book of the nightrunner series ms flewelling achieves the more compelling one of the three:
the plotting is particularly good, the story is definitely interesting, characterization is nearly perfect... she almost overleaps the boundaries of genre fiction (see my review of luck in the shadows).
i especially loved the horror touch of many scenes: the she-necromancer is overwritten but the main villain is extraordinarily charming: call me a pervert but i do like books where the villains are sexy and comely: it makes the plot so much more interesting.
i agree with most reviewrs about beka cavish: she is a weak spot, i think out of too much love of the author; she tends also to be commonplace, even in her physical appearance.
nysander, the wizard, and magyana turn to be unusually deep figures, enjoyably imperfect.
excellent, and this word is hardly enough, is the sentimental journey of the hero: how seregil finally forgets his love for micum and becomes aware of his love for alec: even the last pages, rhetorical enough, are moving and masterly in their writing; alec on his side stops being the poor neglected inhibited orphan boy to grow mature and get out of epic fantasy clichés: his discovery of sex and love, his growing affection for seregil may be not particularly original in themselves but are moving and well written: alec becomes no semigod, just a believable young adult.
this volume too could have been better had it been a bit more polished and i still sense too much womanly sensitivity in the description of gay-male-characters.
still a book to read, highly enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: She Started to Get It Toward the End
Review: I can no longer say I haven't read another book by Lynn Flewelling but it took a long, boring task and someone else reading it to me. Part of the problem is with the plot, it wasn't clear exactly what Flewelling was trying to do. It starts as a mystery, then we wander into a horror story, then it's a capture story, a calvary story, etc. While it all evenutally makes sense, getting there has few exciting or moving moments. However there are some major gross moments.
Toward the end though, when she had all of the characters pretty much on the same page, it started to work for me. As tortured heroes go, I don't think that Seregil won his stripes until nearly the end although I think that was where the exile, failed apprentice, forlorn lover stuff was supposed to take the reader earlier. Just didn't buy it. Alex, in spite of his horrid experiences, didn't seem to be all that affected by the events. Beca is still the stereotypical girl soldier on a horse.
I also have to say that the final sacrifice scene was a bit anticlimatic after what had gone before. What's a few more score prisoners killed when you don't know or care about them? There was actually a set up for a much more harrowing scene but I guess the author decided for some reason not to go there.
I was also amused to note that a book that praises sexual diversity and freedom manages to make two overtly sexual females into villains (although I have to admit that one was a most effective villain) and then kills off a third. Moral? If you are going to be girl in this series get a horse.
Rating:
Summary: Pearnon is dead wrong
Review: I almost died when I read Pearnon's review. Granted, that everyone is entitled to their opinion, that scathing review was a little too much. I first read BDT on a plane to Japan, and fell in love with LF and her world. As soon as I landed in America, I went to the bookstore and bought the Nightrunner series.
I love this series, and the way LF delivers it. It is very character driven, but not everyone likes the battle on every page kind of story. I love Alec and Seregil, their budding romance makes me melt everytime I read it. (I wish that Seregil had just tossed Alec down and..whoa, easy girl). They are the foundation for this series and the political and social problems that they face only make it richer and more pleasing.
There were some parts that did not interest me, but overall, I love this series and have read them so many times that I had to get new copies.
To anyone who has not read this series, what are you waiting for???!! GO! ;)
Rating:
Summary: Ineteresting Story, by far the best
Review: Volume 2 of the Nightrunner series is my favorite mainly due to the fact that in this novel the action and character development are brilliant. We find out more about Seregil's past and about Alec's also, and their attraction for eachother. Now in the first one, Alec was a little afraid to try anything, but with this book, his fears are cured.
Poor Alec suffers a lot in this book, not on a physical level directly, but emotional. That is how he is tortured by the necromancer and that nasty guy. There is a lot of mystery like in the other volumes, but in this one it much more gripping and I found myself flying through the pages, anxious to find out what happens next. I like the first and third volume, but this one is my personal favorite.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad. Very bad.
Review: Terrible book. The two main characters didn't do anything for me (Alec is an innocent doe trying to grow horns and Seregil is a scoundrel; rogue would be too good a denomination), the plot drags with ceaseless city touring (Lynn Flewelling's Guide to Rhíminee!), the exploration of Alec's recently discovered sexuality is gratutious and magic-users are all-powerful except when sucker-punched/stabbed/shot or confronted with an even more all-powerful magic user. The villains delight in their evilness and look at themselves at the mirror and relish at how truly evil they are, and they also leave appropriately evil souvenirs for the good guys in the form of their loved ones, just so they can hate their evilness more in case they hadn't gotten the point. And some of them also like young boys. Oh, but wait, that's right, so does one of the main protagonists... I realize mutual respect and consent are also the point here, and I'm not bashing the book for its gay theme. That's a matter of taste. Rather, it's the concept of a character who is close to a hundred years old in love with a sixteen year old boy which I dislike. That aside, the plot peaks and falls with sudden twists thrown in for good measure and to break the overall stagnation, characters like Beka are given forced protagonism which for me resulted in an added will to skip chapters, and the campaign against Plenimar is such a one-sided affair that the reader wonders if there ever was any real threat to begin with. This waste of paper then culminates with a brouhaha ending with a contrived final battle setting against a villain I never really cared for ever since the beginning and the death of a character who, despite the author's earnest effort, left me cold throughout both novels. The story is character-driven, so if you happen to like the characters, you might get something out of reading Stalking Darkness and the first one, Luck in the Shadows. Otherwise, both are abysmal pieces of fantasy which I regret having read and only did it for a question of principle, i.e. never leave books unfinished.
Terrible.
Rating:
Summary: Character relationship peaks despite stock fantasy plot.
Review: "Stalking Darkness" concludes the tale of Seregil and Alec, the dashing thief and his orphan ward, begun in "Luck in the Shadows." The early chapters see Seregil and Alec prowling through Rhininmee. As in "Luck," both characters flourish in this setting, and their relationship grows in steps appropriately hesitant for a mentor and his charge. The first half of the novel peaks as Seregil and Alec make a key discovery, but the pace stumbles after they reach a dead end and the focus shifts to trite fantasy prophecy. The necromancers' brutal countermove revs up the pace again, but then the plot falls into stock fantasy with evil minions seeking the artifact of their god while the prophesied good characters must stop them. The subtleties of Seregil's and Alec's characters fade in this rush, next to the stock archetypes of Nysander and Micum. In the dash to the conclusion, Seregil and Alec wrestle with inner doubts of whether their friends are dead and whether Nysander's strategies will stop the evil scheme. However, the reader can easily predict the outcome, and the characters' doubts read like melodramatic excuses rather than suspenseful uncertainty even though the ending does simmer with a few unexpected twists. The true conclusion is the relationship between Seregil and Alec. Here, Flewelling's work drips with poignant originality as she confronts an awkward subject, and the final machinations feel perfectly appropriate for both characters. "Stalking Darkness" straddles a line between exciting but predictable adventure fantasy like Raymond E. Feist and more character-focused work like Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy. The overall outcome is never in doubt, but the delicate relationship between Seregil and Alec pulls the reader through the stock fantasy elements.
Rating: 
Summary: A really nicely done follow-up
Review: If you can get by the fantasy equivalent of "man love", you've got a really good story. Probably not for every fantasy reader, but it really is a good story. Great characters with a nice fresh voice. Again, the homosexuality of the main characters is probably going to make some people put down the book--don't, pretend one of them is a woman who can beat the hell out of most men, and wham--you're back in and following up on some great story telling.
Rating:
Summary: An intelligent sequel
Review: "Stalking Darkness" is fantasy entertainment in the tradition of some of the genre's greats. You've got your good guys. You've got your arch bad guy who's trying to get the magic doohickey so that he can perform the ritual that will give him tremendous powers. You've got your escalating series of conflicts, your mysterious characters whose true loyalties are unknown, your intriguing subplots, and so forth. Some people may object that the book is too formulaic, but I don't view it that way. Although the elements may be stereotypical, Lynn Flewelling breathes life into them by paying attention to detail and adding new twists that you don't expect. For example, consider Nysander. In the first book, "Luck in the Shadows", he appeared to be a very typical 'wise old bearded wizard mentor' figure. In this volume, however, he is revealed to be a much more complex character. He is neither all-knowing nor supremely confident. Instead, he struggles with his tasks and has doubts about himself. Another facet of Flewelling's plot that deserves credit is that it never slows down. She never needs to pause and spend fifty pages having characters chat with each other, or waste time on anything that's not relevant to the plot. In fact, almost every chapter in the book contains some new surprise or development. I particularly enjoyed the fact that she doesn't always take the most obvious approach to writing a particular scene, but instead uses betrayals and other plot intrigues to keep the reader on their toes. Lastly, I'll agree with other reviewers who applauded the author's handling of the relationship between Seregil and Alec in "Stalking Darkness". I'm willing to read about any couple in a fantasy novel; to me, it doesn't matter whether the characters involved are gay or straight. What does matter is that the relationship is well-written and interesting. In "Stalking Darkness", the interaction between Seregil and Alec feels real, and the characters' reaction to it are remarkably human.
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