The Memory of Souls

All hell (literally) breaks loose in the challenging saga of crisscrossing quests that makes up Lyons’s third Chorus of Dragons epic fantasy (after The Name of All Things). The wards entrapping Vol Karoth, “the king of demons,” have weakened. Kihrin D’Mon hopes to keep the demon from escaping while Relos Var, the demon’s creator and Kihrin’s reincarnated brother from a previous life, campaigns to unleash Vol Karoth and use him to seal the wound that is slowly ripping the world apart. Both the ritual to repair the wards and the one to break them require enormous amounts of power. To complete either, the powerful vané, the last race to possess immortality, would have to relinquish their longevity. As the brothers race to convince the vané to sacrifice their immortality, Kihrin confronts his feelings for his companions, Janel and Teraeth; comes face to face with the dragon Baelosh; and duels with the Goddess of Death. Lyons raises stakes to a fever pitch while providing an overabundance of character backstory and worldbuilding history. The view of the climactic battle is eye-catching, but the casual reader might get lost on the way there as the byzantine plot is filled with switchbacks and turnarounds. Series fans will enjoy revisiting Lyons’s complex world. Agent: Sam Morgan, Foundry Literary. (Aug.)