Customer Reviews

Dai-San

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DAI-SAN completes the Sunset Warrior trilogy featuring a conflicted bladesman called Ronin. This book falls apart halfway through, once Ronin's name is changed in the narrative to The Sunset Warrior the series runs out of steam in one massive exhale that can't be resuscitated by a big drawn-out battle scene in DAI-SAN's final pages. The first half of the book follows Ronin directly after the events of the preceding volume SHALLOWS OF NIGHT and maintains the high standard established in the first two novels. The remaining 150 pages are an uphill slog.

It's evident that Lustbader wearied of the Sunset Warrior series, despite writing two sequels years later and apart. He was probably eager to get on with writing his much superior NINJA thriller. Shoddy or NO editing ruins DAI-SAN. If a line editor worked on what was likely a first draft manuscript, why does the word oblique appear 200 times in 300 pages?

If you started the series you might as well finish DAI-San at least. The trilogy is short by today's standards, all three books equal the length of a single Robert Jordan tome. I read this when it first came out and was very much surprised five years later to read a Frank Miller series with a character resembling Ronin and going under that very name. As a whole the Sunset Warrior series is good enough to have influenced other writers, too bad it didn't end as spectacularly as it started.