“Sixth Watch” by Sergei Lukyanenko

I liked the ending of the saga.

Apparently Lukyanenko is writing another one, although the reviews are not exactly inspiring, so honestly I would rather this stayed the true ending.

The book mostly continues what the previous ones have been building toward, which I appreciated. There is a nice sense that a lot of old threads are finally converging instead of another completely separate magical crisis appearing out of nowhere.

That said, the whole vampires-were-the-first-and-main-Others thing felt a bit weird and somewhat unwarranted. I’m not sure the earlier books really earned that reveal. Still, it was kind of fun.

Bringing back characters who were very definitely gone — sometimes more than once — was less fun. At some point death starts losing a bit of meaning if everyone can just wander back into the story when needed.

And the escalation is getting pretty obvious now. Every few books we discover another antagonist that is somehow even more powerful than the previous impossibly powerful antagonist, everyone panics, throws increasingly ridiculous amounts of magic at it, and then it gets wrecked too.

Still, I really liked the cohesion of the ending. A surprising amount of stuff from earlier books ends up mattering, and you can actually feel that the series has been moving toward this conclusion for a long time. That was a very nice touch.

The final twist was maybe a little too much of a happy ending for me. I think I would have preferred the harsher version to be the actual ending. It would have had more weight.

Either way, I’ll miss these characters. I really enjoyed discovering this world with them.

But they are so absurdly overpowered by now that I’m not sure where another book can even go. I suspect it will be another “save the world using as much magic as physically possible” story, and what I liked most about the early books was almost the opposite: mundane life, detective work, slowly discovering how this strange hidden world actually works.

Good ending. Good saga. Probably a good place to stop.