This will be brief! It's not often I admit defeat and put a book down unfinished, but with Taltos, one that has been sat on my shelf for years, I decided enough was enough. Unknown to me when I purchased it, Taltos is the third in the Mayfair Witches trilogy (which you don't known unless you read the author's blurb). When I learned this I figured, hey, it'll have to be a self-contained story anyway so as not alienate the reader who hasn't read books one and two, right? Maybe it does, but to me it felt too much like I'd started reading a story halfway through, about characters I was supposed to care about but didn't know well enough to do so. There was something about a woman who was supposedly a witch - nothing anyone did showed any witchlike abilities - waking from a catatonic state, another character killed 'off screen', and a giant-type character who's a millionaire business man in America, but who's really a centuries old creature called a Taltos. Not that I found out in 150 pages the significance of this. I found the writing very dry and the events uninvolving, and it felt like there was a hell of a lot of expositionary dialogue trotted out to explain what happened in the first two books. So I decided life's too short to read books I'm not into to, and I gave up. I'll stick with Anne's son Christopher Rice in future, whose books are excellent.
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