first of all- I feel biased about this book because I am a huge fan of this series but also I think that the rest of the books are required reading to understand this book at all (call that a flaw if you want, I get it tbf). I did enjoy reading it but also felt it is a huge lost opportunity and waste of potential.

Positives first! Love Ghastly as the perspective character. Ghastly is an underrated main character in the other series and I missed him a lot in Phase 2. Great to have him back! and great to see his mother! It makes her being dead in the later series so much worse because god what a cool woman. We already knew she was cool (boxer, warrior, psychic?? sign me up) but seeing how loving she was and her relationship with Ghastly made me way more mad at Lord Vile for killing her. 

Also loved Rapture and Ghastly, a star crossed lovers who only ever meet in one version of a disrupted timeline who save the world but doom themselves to never meet? beautifully tragic. Also tragic is the hint at a romance between Saracen and Dexter since we know their main timeline counterparts never expressed this and now ever can. 

The other Dead Men are also great in this, they always are. Landy has got writing them down perfectly and their dynamic and banter is fun and witty. The addition of adult Valkyrie into their group is fun especially with her being mad at Ravel because tbf I can't forgive him either. 

Do think the cast is a little overcrowded, the 7 Dead Men plus Valkyrie plus other characters make for hard to follow scenes and fights. In certain more information heavy scenes the Dead Men are basically interchangeable and some of them could have just been left out for the sake of clarity. It also does a disservice to each of them since we only get so many character moments there's not enough to go around so you're relying on your knowledge and love for these characters from the other books. This is particularly bad for Hopeless since he isn't in the other books and giving him some focus would have been interesting yet he's just there to be the assassin one. The only character we actually learn more about and get interesting stuff that we could only get by looking at their past is Ghastly. 


The biggest gripe I have is that the concept of going into 1907 or any point in the war and seeing what the Dead Men were up to would be a very interesting book without all the time travel involved. In fact, adding Valkyrie and time travel made the book worse. None of the plot matters, none of this really happened and it won't affect the real versions of the characters. Why bother writing this? If it were up to me I'd have it follow Ghastly again after the Death of Skulduggery but during the period of him being lord Vile and I'd centre it around the death of his mother. Lots of dramatic irony since the readers know Lord Vile is Ghastly's best friend who he's currently mourning. 

Any plot that actually happened to the characters we care about would have been better though. I love Valkyrie but when the twist happened and she appeared I was actually disappointed. I know Landy loves a twist but this one was a bit too much. It made the book less enjoyable and killed any reread value.