I scored Betrayed By The Hero’s Party Book 2 a lot lower than book one, and I’ll be honest about why straight away, because it’s the same thing I flagged last time only worse. The prose still sounds like it came out of a machine. Long, repetitive, boring in stretches, and I nearly didn’t finish it, which almost never happens to me with a series I went in wanting to like. When I wrapped up my review of book one I said I’d be reading the next one and hoping it would read a little more human by then. I did read it. It doesn’t.
The setup this time is a good one on paper. Dorn’s established now, a working Warden of Works with a posted rate, and the job is a hundred-year-old containment wall up on the northern moor that the guild won’t inspect and the Crown won’t pay for, kept standing off the books by an old shepherd whose family has been quietly patching it for three generations. Something under it is waking up. The guild’s answer is to kill whatever wakes and Dorn’s whole trade is built on the opposite idea, that nothing properly kept ever needs killing, and there’s a decent book in that clash. I just never felt like I was reading it.
Getting to seventy percent and running out of reasons
I got to about 70% and was really flagging. That’s the honest version of how this went. I kept going because I figured something new had to turn up eventually, a twist, a change of pace, or at the very least the prose loosening up a bit now that the setup was out of the way, and sadly none of that really happened. The same kind of scene just kept arriving in the same kind of sentences. Dorn looks at a problem, Dorn understands it better than anybody else in the room, Dorn fixes it, and the book spends a paragraph or three telling you how well he fixed it, with the ledger and bookkeeping detail piled on top so every repair comes with its own receipt.
And the declarative thing I complained about in book one hasn’t gone anywhere. Every sentence closes itself off, every paragraph lands on a neat little verdict, and after a few hundred pages of that it’s like being read a very long invoice. Book one had the benefit of the idea being fresh, so I could forgive a lot. By book two the idea isn’t new anymore and the prose has to do some of the work. It can’t.
Which is a shame, because I was one of the people making excuses for it. Last time I said it might be somebody writing in a second language and I didn’t want to be unfair, and I still don’t know for certain what’s going on behind it, but when the same tics are this thick two books in, it’s hard to keep giving it the benefit of the doubt. A long book can get away with being slow. A long book that’s slow and says everything twice is a lot harder to get through.
Dorn can do anything, so nothing matters
The bigger problem, for me, is Dorn himself. He continues to demonstrate his powers of keeping, and he basically can do anything he wants at this point. Which would be fine in a power fantasy if the world pushed back at all, but it doesn’t, because everyone else in the realm is useless. The guild makes mistakes, the Crown makes mistakes, the officials make mistakes, all of them fairly stupid ones, and the only person who can ever sort it out is Dorn. Every time. There’s no moment where he’s actually out of his depth, where he has to lean on someone else, or where the cozy approach costs him anything real.
And that’s what drained the tension out of the wall plot for me. Something ancient is stirring under a century-old barrier, and I never once worried about how it would turn out, because I’d already watched Dorn out-think an entire civilisation for two books running. The shepherd is the most interesting person in the book, a woman who’s kept this thing alive for decades with no backup and no thanks, and she ends up mostly standing to one side while he takes over. I’d have happily read a lot more of her.
It’s a very different kind of cozy from something like Beware of Chicken, where the low stakes feel like a choice the main character makes and the people around him are real people with their own stuff going on. Here the low stakes just come from nobody else being competent enough to be a threat. Or a help. Oh yeah, and he marries the smith. Whoop, whoop. That’s about all the romance subplot managed to get out of me, and it’s a fair summary of how much anything in the book landed.
Where that leaves me with this series
It’s really hard to say too much positive about this one. Nothing new happened, nothing changed, and by the end I was mostly bored, which is a rough place to land for a book whose whole pitch is that the quiet repairman is secretly the most important person in the world. The first book sold me on that idea. This one just repeats it at length until I stopped caring whether it was true.
I know I’m on the grumpy end here. Plenty of people on Goodreads are giving it high marks and calling it a worthy sequel, and if book one’s prose never bothered you I can see this being more of the same in a good way. More Dorn, more fixing, more of the realm learning its lesson. But if you were already on the fence after book one because of how it reads, I don’t think book two is going to win you back, and it lost me completely. It’s on Kindle Unlimited, which is the only reason I’d even suggest trying the first chapter to see for yourself. There’s a book three out already, and I won’t be reading it. First time in a while I’ve dropped a LitRPG series this early, and a bit of a letdown given how much I liked the idea of this one going in.
Rating: a long way below book one, and the series ends here for me. No number from me on this one, just a pass.