I found Shapers of Darkness to be the weakest of the five but I can't quite place why. The pace moves along rather quickly but I found myself thoroughly uninterested in certain plot lines (most predominantly the goings on in Galdasten)--so much that I took a nearly three month hiatus from reading halfway through and just recently finished it up. That isn't to say that this book isn't entertaining because it is, I just found it less so than the others, including Weavers of War (the fifth book in the series.)