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SAINT CAMBER is my 5th Deryni read, & you could copy-paste from my previous Kurtz forays to cobble together my response. Like, say, this paragraph from my review of Book 4:

There’s never anything more than surface to the characters; you never become attached to them, never particularly care if someone lives or dies, never especially hope anyone wins or loses. There’s lots of to’ing & fro’ing, some arcane rituals, some medieval political backstabbing, even some sword fighting…but it never touches any depth of emotion in yours truly. The most all-encompassing word I can think of is superficial.

…Combined with this (condensed) clipping from my review of Book 3:

Other issues remain constant: no significant female presence; repeated rehashing conversations; terrible pace; easy fixes to big problems.

…And there you have it.

Obviously Kurtz was trying to include Evaine more in the first half of this book—she allows us to see a brief glimpse of her domestic + magical life with Rhys, which is a departure from previous female characters—but then Evaine is abruptly dropped & mentioned only as being pregnant or as witness to Camber’s “sainthood.�� The villainous Ariella—who had the potential to be a delightfully nasty antagonist—is barely included, making a 3-pg cameo to look at maps & then appearing again only in her death scene. And as for Megan, good grief. The girl has 3 lines in the entire book, all of which are begging for Cinhil’s attention. 🙄

So. *shrug* Kurtz (again) denies significant female presence to balance the overwhelmingly male cast, leaving characters who feel gay even if they’re not supposed to be, characters who might be gay except it’s so vaguely alluded to that their sexuality is indistinguishable from magical connectivity, & lots of talking heads to fill the remaining expositional dialogue. You also have a whiny king digging in his heels against a hypocritical self-righteous kingmaker—which might be a fun conflict if they weren’t such an annoying pair—with the talking heads rubbing your face in their tedium by continually yapping about the aforementioned king & kingmaker…yada yada. 🥱 (Also, the way Camber justifies poking around in other minds & manipulating their emotions because he decides it’s best for them to know/not know or feel/not feel is truly obnoxious…but there’s no exploration of such blurred morality because clearly we’re supposed to accept Camber’s knowledge as superior & everything he does as Right + Good(tm) for the betterment of humans & Deryni both. Why? Because the author says so. Camber is a Good Guy—no further excuse needed. Say what? 🤔)

Yet again the pacing is terrible; yet again the plot is buried beneath dry prose & flat personalities. Even so, I wanted to see the conclusion of this installment & will undoubtedly plod through the final Camber novel, so there’s *something* that keeps me invested just enough to continue; that mysterious *something* is enough for the usual tepid 3 stars (a trademark of my Deryni experience 🤖), but I don’t understand why they’re considered to be icons of the genre.