Nanny Ogg's reviews and stuff

Overall, my feelings about this book is that it was kind of... pointless.

Justin reappears on Crooked Tree ranch after 12 years of everyone thinking he was dead. He thought he was about to die and he wanted to do it somewhere he considered home. He didn't die, mostly because Sam found him and got help and basically nursed him back to health.
In the meanwhile, most of the rest of the ranch found out he's alive, including his best friends, Gabe and Adam, his brother Ethan and his father Marcus. Naturally they all wanted to know what the hell Justin was up to while everybody believed him dead, but he wouldn't tell them because he didn't want to make them a target of an assassin he's expecting to come and kill him at any second because of the things he knows. So he repeatedly brushes their questions off and is waiting to get strong enough so he could run away.

This all happens in the first 70% of the book. I was amazed at the number of ways the writer vaguely explained something without actually telling us anything we didn't already know. Justin didn't only keep in the dark every character in the book , he kept the readers in the dark too. Soon enough I got extremely bored and just wanted for the book to finally end. The last 30% of the book was more focused on Justin's and Sam's relationship, but at that point I stopped caring at all.

The reason I'm giving this book 2 stars instead of one is that part of my frustration probably comes from not reading the first two books in the series - I just wasn't invested in the characters enough to care what happened to them, and maybe I would have been have I read the first two books.