Tears of a Dragon by Bryan Davis

Now that Billy let the Watchers out of their prison in order to save his father, these evil spirits are roaming all over the earth, wreaking havoc wherever they touch, and attempting to distract Billy and company. When Morgan kidnaps Walter's sister Shelly in order to have a hostiam, they decide it's time to take drastic measures. Therefore, Billy and Bonnie enter Dragon's Rest, a place where the dragons come to rest when they die, since they have had no redeemer to let them into heaven. They are looking for three people in particular: Clefspeare, Merlin's wife, and Professor Hamilton's wife. Billy faces a hard decision there in which he must sacrifice himself to be a redeemer.

The entire concept of Dragon's Rest is an original setting, much like the concept of the candlestone. Bryan Davis returns to originality in Tears of a Dragon, but not completely. The first half of the book is littered with wasted time and situations with typical outcomes. The last chapters of the book and Dragon's Rest are the saving grace that puts this book on the Elite List.

The characters never developed any personality as they should have throughout the series, but most of them stayed realistic and imperfect throughout the series. Bryan's worst problem in the character area was unnecessary characters, but that was set straight in the end.

The basis of the series, translumination, comes too much in handy at times for the characters. In every book, Bryan seems to come up with a new way Excaliber can get the characters out of scrapes. However, the idea of translumination was well thought out and not mindless like some of the other ideas Bryan Davis has cooked up.

The ideas and legends about dragons Bryan invented were ingenious and original, thus creating a good basis for a series. These ideas, again, were not mindless most of the time in their origin. They instead were very persuasive in their content and were good enough to be real.

I wish I could rate the final book in this series five stars because of the highly original end, but there is too much clutter at the beginning keeping the book away from this honor. Nevertheless, this has been a good debut series and gives hope for Bryan Davis down the road. If he keeps this trend up, he'll have a five star in no time.

4.5 stars