It’s a good thing that I read The Dire King fairly soon after Ghostly Echoes because The Dire King picks up directly where The Ghostly Echoes left off. Since this is the last book in the series, this review will have spoilers for earlier books, so skip this review if you’ve not read the previous books.

In The Dire King, Jackaby and Abigail are racing against time to prevent the Dire King from coming back and destroying the world. At the same time, Mayor Spade has finally been convinced that mythical creatures exist, and perhaps predictably, he is overreacting by rounding up all magical creatures and putting them into jail.

While The Dire King is a fast, action-packed book, it does suffer from a few difficulties. The key weakness of the book, in my opinion, is that it tries to do far too much. Three big issues for me were:

1. Abigail and Charlie’s romance: Honestly, they seemed to spend the first three books crushing on each other, so it felt like a lot of romance development was crammed in this one book and it felt unconvincing. That said, the last scene was kind of touching.
2. Charlie’s family appearing: This was actually part of the main plot, and because we have one book to understand these characters and why they do what they do, I felt like this point was far too rushed and unconvincing.
3. Mayor Spade: I understand his over-reaction, but what happens to his anti-magical creature campaign? Once the story focused on the Dire King, this seemed to be forgotten

With all the above happening and Jackaby and Abigail working to prevent the end of the world, the book can feel rather overwhelming at times. Not to mention that many characters from previous books make an appearance and I’m not going to lie, I feel like I should know who Hatun was but I don’t remember. It’s the small things like that which pulled me out of the story and onto the internet to try and refresh my memory.

Despite the issues that I have with this book, I’m still glad that I read it because it’s a fairly short series and I did want to know what would happen when I finished Ghostly Echoes. For the most part, it’s a fun and exciting book and some continuity issues I have is probably my fault because I didn’t binge the series. Still, I wish the book took a little more time to develop some of the plot lines here.

If you’ve read everything and you’ve not started the series, I still recommend the first two books because they are fun and mostly standalone fantasy mysteries!