This series is going to go down as one of my all time favorites. It's the type of historical fiction, even with its changes from the true story, that makes me want to go read more about the actual history when I get done. And there were even times as I was reading that I would have to put the book down and go Google a fact about the actual person, Vlad the Impaler, that Lada was based on. By this third and final book in the series, it doesn't matter how violent and abrasive of a person as Lada is, I was still rooting for her, and hoping so much that things could work out the way she deserved, even knowing that with the way the actual history went, she wouldn't get all that she wanted. I do like that the author decided to take a bit of history, besides the whole being a female thing, and give her a bit of a happy time. As with the other books, if I remember correctly, whenever I picked this one up, it was almost impossible to put down. It's not necessarily an "easy" read, because it is very detailed and goes into so much with the characters, but it is a page-turner anyway.

As much as we had learned and gotten to know the characters in the first two books, in this ending to the story we really got to see just how all of those things we'd read about, their actions and things they'd said before made them the person they were. Lada's brother Radu was the person there to see how all of it went down, and how these two really larger than life people - his sister Lada and Mehmed - became the people they were and why they did what they did. I'll admit that in the first two books there were a lot of times I did not like Radu. I've always been on Lada's side, I think. And when he did not even support or stand by his own sister, when he tried to take Mehmed away from her in his own way, I just couldn't stand him. And he did some of those same things in this book. But like with the other two, his character really starts to make a lot of sense, and you realize that's just who he is, and accept him for those things that make him Radu.

One other thing that is unique, in my opinion, about a historical story like this, is that you have more than one gay character. And while there are the obvious issues that they would have had to deal with in the time period it takes place in, the characters are able to be good people and their stories are ones that you are also rooting for.

I can't tell you a whole lot more, without giving away things that you should probably not know if you want to read the whole series.