The middle volumes in a series can be a creative challenge for authors. You don't want to spend so much time reintroducing characters that you bore your returning audience, but if you don't lay out enough background information, new readers won't have a complete grasp on the story. So J.A. Pitts has his work cut out for him in Honeyed Words, the sequel to 2010's Black Blade Blues. That first book introduced Sarah Beauhall, a Seattle-area blacksmith who repaired a sword said to have been forged by Odin, thus calling upon herself the attention of the dragons who secretly rule our world (but because they can shapeshift, they appear to us as über-wealthy humans). By coincidence, the medieval reenactment society run by her girlfriend's brother is actually a secret organization dedicated to fighting those dragons, but that information is only coming out in dribs and drabs.
For much of Honeyed Words, Sarah and her friends try to put their lives back together after the climactic battle of the last novel, but with one of that book's most significant dramatic tensions--could Katie convince Sarah to come out of the closet?--resolved, the conflicts become increasingly external. Thus, several new characters are introduced as Pitts broadens the scope of his fantasy world, which borrows extensively from Norse mythology. (There's a running joke in the series about how real dwarves are nothing like the ones in Tolkien.) Ultimately, though, the new challenges Sarah faces are intimately connected to her previous troubles, while still other plot threads (both hers and the dragons') remain unresolved, presumably to be addressed in next year's Forged in Fire. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com