A Darker Shade of Magic is one of those books that has an excellent premise and really good characters but with plot that just absolutely crawls, and that isn't to say that it's a bad thing (sort of like The Raven Boys?). Mostly, I really liked it. There were just a few things that snagged me and I couldn't quite get over, and most of those things were the ending.

Spoiler

This ending included my least favorite plot device of all time: hero taunts villain for being too chicken to fight without villain's clearly superior weapon, so they fight sans weapon and hero wins. I HATE IT and I was so salty when it happened in this book. I was also kind of disappointed that the story never took us to Black London, which I kind of wanted to see and felt a little cheated out of.