Brief Synopsis
“The Empty Grave” is the fifth and final book in Jonathan Stroud’s “Lockwood & Co.” series. On the hunt for answers, Lockwood, Lucy, George, Holly, and Kipps find themselves thrown into one grand conspiracy after another…one that might even define the Problem itself.
Content Warnings: Violence (PG-13), Horror, Death
What Do I Think?
When one arrives at a finale, they expect things to be great and bombastic: looming questions to be answered, villains to be vanquished, and story threads to reach their (hopefully satisfying) conclusion. Jonathan Stroud’s earlier series, “Bartimaeus” certainly followed this trend with the end of that trilogy, and as I’ve plodded along through “Lockwood & Co.”, I expected the final novel here to be more of the same.
How disappointing it was, then, to find that “The Empty Grave” follows in the footsteps of the first two novels in its series, which, while enjoyable, left something to be desired in terms of both pacing and suspense.
The beginning of the novel certainly starts off in a good manner, with Lucy and company going off in search of answers based on the ending of the previous book – there is high tension, great stakes, and the character writing is at its best. But after their adventure goes awry and they are left with more questions than answers, the story stalls and Lucy in particular is left with next to nothing to do. This is perhaps where the weakness of being tied to a single POV character becomes evident: though Lucy Carlyle is a great POV for the action scenes or for sneaking around, anything having to do with research or discovery is largely narrated to her, particularly by George. Normally this wouldn’t be such a huge deal – after all, it is important for characters to each have their own roles – but it comes across as a weakness here when Stroud seems at a loss on what to have Lucy do in the meantime. Her banter with the talking skull is fantastic, but can only go so far.
Thankfully, “The Empty Grave” pulls it together with an ending that nicely ties up most of the plotlines, providing enough twists and danger even at the end to keep you on the edge of your seat. This too, unfortunately, is hampered by the dull middle, and results in a third act that comes across as extremely rushed. Though I am glad for its ending, I found myself wishing there had been more time spent with the characters processing everything that happened to them.
Don’t take my quibbling as a negative review, however. At the end of the day, “The Empty Grave” still pulls off a grand story and serves as an effective conclusion to a thrilling series. It’s just disappointing that it didn’t live up to the novels which came before it.
Jacob Ryckman 