Hi; I’ve been reading all your books ever since The Winter King; and I’ve particularly enjoyed the Saxon Chronicles – until the last one! Not that it was a bad story, but the deaths of Haesten and Brida seemed forced to me; Haesten was Uhtred’s ever-recurring knuckle-headed nemesis, never to succeed but always to come back and try again, and I’ll miss him – but I thought he deserved a better death than he got. Yes, he broke an oath; but Uhtred came close to doing that a few times himself! Brida is a lot more complicated; I always thought she represented Uhtred’s wild side, and lived the life Uhtred wanted to live; I hoped she would have aged a lot more gracefully, and with Ragnar’s death would have forced a choice on Uhtred – Bebbanburg and Brida, with Dunholm’s help; or continuing his pointless (and terminally boring) servitude to Aethelflaed. Getting chopped to pieces as a bitter, evil, ugly old crone seemed kind of a harsh end! Oh well, now that you have largely swept the stage clean, I’m looking for much bigger things in the next book!
John