The story's getting darker, what with the whole evil-henchman-and-reluctant-ally-both-being-fed-to-lions, but I enjoy darkness in my fiction and to add to that, the pace here is picking up. The ending, in particular, is breaking out of the expected mould at last. The splitting up of the Baudelaire siblings has been coming for a while - Olaf is always saying he only needs one of them, but I'm at a loss to figure out why he never makes it clear that one should be Violet. After all, the surviving child only has to survive until their 18th birthday in order to inherit, and if he has Violet that's only another 4 years away. So of course he plumps for Sunny, sticking himself with childcare for the best part of two decades before the cash comes in, but then no-one ever claimed logic was the high point of this series. At this point I'm just going along with things for the moderate level of enjoyment it brings.