The Lair of Bones (Runelords)

Amazon writes:
Certain works of fantasy are immediately recognizable as monuments, towering above the rest of the category. They have been written by the likes of Stephen R. Donaldson, Robert Jordan, and Terry Goodkind. Now add to that list David Farland, whose epic fantasy series began with The Runelords, continued in Brotherhood of the Wolf and the New York Times bestseller Wizardborn, and reaches its peak now in The Lair of Bones.

Unfortunately, Amazon is wrong. What started off as an interesting story buttressed by a creative take on the feudal system quickly fell victim to unncessary complications and simply authorial incompetence. The reader is asked to empathize with cardboard cutouts while the villians go through the motions of presenting a threat. The simple purity of rune magic could have offered a way to explore the complex moral questions of the feudal system, but instead fell to irrelevance in the face of more traditional magical systems.

The Lair of Bones amounts to little more than a superhuman dungeon crawl. The potential that was present in the first novel has by this point been squandered.