The Descent by Alma Katsu (The Immortal Trilogy)

Started: 3.1.26

Finished: 4.1.26

Paperback

Hmmm. Hmmm. 

I wanted to love this book as much as the first two. But it just seemed to go in a weird direction. 

It begins a few months after Luke has died from cancer. (He and Lanore had spent 4 years together, after Adair had let her go). I'm not sure what the point of Luke was really. I know he played a role in her life, but I'm not sure how necessary it was.

Lanny is having nightmares about Jonathan being tortured in the underworld. Yes, she's still obsessed with him, which I found increasingly frustrating.

Although he did redeem himself towards the end of his life, he was never really very good to her, but she couldn't let him go. She decides that she must go to the underworld to rescue him, and the only person who can help her with that is Adair.

He has been living in exile on a mystery island, although when Lanny arrives she finds that he is enjoying the company of two young women. He later confesses to her that he thinks they may be possessed by / reincarnations of two witch sisters who he'd wronged in a previous lifetime. That was a bit random and out of the blue.

Adair is now a changed man, and just as he agrees to help Lanny go to the underworld, she finally realises that she loves him. At last!!

He doesn't need to kill her, he just casts a spell to send her spirit there to look for Jonathan. What feels like just minutes and hours for her, are months passing for Adair while he keeps vigil over her sleeping body. The sections in the underworld also felt like months passing for me, to be honest, it really slowed things down.

At one point, Adair is drugged by the two women (who are the witches, as he suspected) and they throw Lanny's body into the sea. He summons huge waves which wash her back to him, but wash away the two women. So that's that. 

He has no way of knowing what is happening to Lanny in the underworld, and realises that the only thing he can do is join her there, which he does.

It transpires that Adair is actually the King Of The Underworld, but he'd escaped and had all his memories erased, and new ones implanted, to allow him to survive in the real world. The Queen is actually his sister; he didn't want to marry her though, because, ew, incest! (Nevermind all the other stuff he's done). In the end, they have to ask The Big Man (God - long white hair, toga style outfit) for permission to be allowed to return to the real world and live as mortals, which he allows. Meanwhile, Jonathan is promoted to Queen Consort / new King Of The Underworld.

The whole underworld section is just where it fell down for me. It turned out that the Queen had sent those nightmares to Lanny, and that actually Jonathan was quite happy and didn't need rescuing, so once again she'd screwed things up chasing after him. I'm glad that she finally realised that she loved Adair, and that it'd kind of been him all along, but when they returned from the underworld, it was practically on THE LAST PAGE! We never got to see them together, properly in love!