Ritnym's Daughter

The final installment of Gilluly's Greenbriar trilogy uses venerable fantasy plot lines--a young ruler's coming-of-age, an Armageddon avoided--to wrap up the fates of Queen Ariadne and all the denizens of Greenbriar Castle. Here the mysterious Crystal of Healing is lost, and a new one created to guarantee the continuity of Illyria. Gilluly relies on constant invention of details for her fantasy world, not character development, to shepherd the novel along. Many chapters bog down in the minutiae of what the Illyrians and their Fair Folk companions, the Teazles, believe, do or eat. Her story is so crammed with characters, locations and subplots that the reader may need to sketch family trees, maps, etc. as visual aids. The final pages are a sweet, cheerful coda to the trilogy, uniting the protagonists for a celebration not unlike the cast party that concludes a motion-picture shoot. (Dec.)