The Last Light of the Sun, by Guy Gavriel Kay returns to type. Various sympathetic characters’ lives weave together toward an unexpected climax. And there’s a battle at the end.
Now we are in a time and place much like England when the Vikings still held the Danelaw. The stary remains in the same alternate history as the previous few books, which I like, and the references to previous work are to Sarantium and not Fionavar, which I like, but it felt too much another version of the same tragic friends forced into conflict story.
Mostly it made me want to read more about King Alfred.
Writing Every Day 