The Nature of Things

I read a review of this book recently that intrigued me. So much so that I decided to break my cardinal rule for reading series: Start reading with the first entry and read the books in order. This is the seventeenth book in the series and I decided that life is just too short for me to go back and read those other sixteen books before I get to the one that I'm really interested in.  So, new rule: Read what you want to read when you want to read it. Thus, free at last, I proceeded to read Desolation Mountain . I'm sure if I had read all of those previous books I would have had a more complete understanding of the recurring characters and their relationships, but I thought the author actually did a more than adequate job of slipping in the details that a new reader who was reading this book like a "stand-alone" would need in order to understand what was going on. The main protagonist is Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor, former sheriff of Tamarack County in far no...