3* (emotional 4*, execution 2.5*)

If you LOVE the Inheritance Cycle , then I think Murtagh will please you but also frustrate you. I was really happy to have it and I mostly enjoyed reading and listening to it but it suffers for having two main characters with such profound PTSD that everything is a trauma response. As a result, the book has a lot of the darkness of the later series that even the volume of easter eggs (if you know your Eragon really well) doesn't really solve. There are some extreme pacing issues and too many unfinished threads, especially as the questions Murtagh is trying to answer are almost all unanswered at the end of the book. We go through a lot without getting the same kind of progress as in the other four books even though this is clearly setting up another book. In comparison to the other rider/dragon relationships, I also find Murtagh and Thorn's pairing the least developed and the most superficial. I missed the humour of most of the other partnerships.

Minor spoiler in this paragraph only: I really didn't enjoy the number of mentions of Eragon in Murtagh when Eragon does not, then, appear in this book. It felt as though Paolini was teasing a cameo that he suddenly decided to save for the next one.