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.