Waterblack

Cities of the Weft, Book 3

By: Alex Pheby

Narrated by: Jay Lafayette Valentine

The monumental conclusion to Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft trilogy.

One thousand million infants are dead, and Nathan Treeves is back. He’s become the Master of Waterblack, the City of the Dead.

And Sharli, once a sacrifice, then an assassin, is now a trained God-Killer. She has killed many—but failed in killing Nathan Treeves years ago.

Soon she, and the Women’s Vanguard, will have another chance, even as The Master, The Mistress and the Atheistic Crusade hurtle toward their final confrontation.

The world of Mordew returns in the epic conclusion to the Cities of the Weft trilogy. Welcome to Waterblack.

©2025 Alex Pheby (P)2025 Recorded Books

A Discombobulated Mess of a “Story”

I have many negative things to say about this book- so I will begin, BRIEFLY, with the positive:

The narrator is good, I never felt like a character was poorly voiced or found difficulty in understanding his pronunciation. His reading was never breathy sounding or rushed. Good job!

The rich use of vocabulary, descriptions, atmospheric world building that I love is still present in this book as it was in the first two of the series.

Lastly, the world of the Weft is still here. For all the injustices I feel were done to it in this final book it is still amazingly imaginative, surprising, and engrossing to be in.

Now I will begin my critique.

This book, as a conclusion to the trilogy, is an epic disaster. A sloppy, discombobulated, literary time waster with the author masquerading as an omniscient narrator who addresses the reader at several points to tell us how if we don’t like what is happening we are wrong and go shove it where the sun don’t shine!

Firstly, this book excels in making me not care about what is happening in half of it. Then proving, in its conclusion, that I was absolutely correct in not caring for all the effect it ultimately had on the book’s ending.

Do you like the central character’s from the first two titles? Yes? Well this is not the book for you. They will hardly make any appearance whatsoever in this book. Nathan will appear for about 100 pages, effect essentially nothing then exit.
Prissy is a stranger to us when we see her. She has been distilled from a vibrant character we connected with in earlier books to a sloppy plot device appearing in unrecognizable form to conclude this one.
The Master of Mordew? The boogie man of the first book and distracted nemesis in Malarkoi. Where is he? You find him in a small entry within the Appendix here. Thrown away for all intents and purposes.

Perhaps most grating was the narrator on top of all this. Tell me a story, don’t lecture me. The only thing worse than seeing next to none of the characters I cared about, learning next to nothing new about the history of the Weft-world, getting a thoroughly unsatisfactory ending that was rushed and anti-climactic in the extreme, was being lectured to by the narrator about it all.

You knew what you were doing Alex. I get it that this is a pretty hipster series, maybe a new form of fantasy even perhaps. You had me with you through the first two books. If you want to destroy your story’s ending go ahead, it’s your story after all. But don’t lecture me, your reader, journeying with you on this path about how I should feel about it or what I should want or expect.

After this I would hesitate before picking up another of your books Mr. Pheby.