Blood of the Fold is the third book in the Sword of Truth series. Published in October of 1996 and clocking in at 623 pages. The book feels much different from the first two in the series. Though it still suffers from the objectification of women, it takes on a much more political aspect to the series. Unlike the previous two books, this feels much more like a continuation and does not have the strongest story line in itself. 

In book 1, Richard ventures to the midlands and tries to stop Darken Rahl from opening the boxes of Orden. The second book is Richard being sent to the Palace of the Prophets and works to stop the keeper from entering the world of the living. Book 3 does not have so much a start and end story to it, but more of a continuation of the second book where the Palace of the Prophets still plays a big role.

Plot of Blood of the Fold

Richard is working to unite the midlands and D’Hara in which he is now the lord of. In order to protect them from the looming threat of the imperial order, they all must join forces to take down this massive threat. Essentially most of this book is Richard politically maneuvering these people together. Since his part of the book is the largest, the political maneuvering really causes some pacing issues. Much of what Richard was doing was forgettable to me, and since he dominates this book, the book became forgettable as a whole.

Kahlan’s story was rather small and really wasn’t groundbreaking. I feel that her chapters, though few and far between were nice when getting away from Richards political slog. But I just had a desire to learn more of the one story that was actually interesting in this book: the Palace of the Prophets story line.

There is intrigue and a looming threat of the imperial order over this location in the series. We get nice character growth from Verna as she turns into a mature leader of the Palace.

The Blood of the Fold is yet another rip off from a different series. Terry Goodkind, if I had a dollar for every thing that you blatantly steal and put in this series, I would have enough to buy a whole series that you are ripping of instead cause it’s done better elsewhere. Rant aside, Blood of the Fold is an army that hunt down magic users. This army feels unnecessary to the story that is already lacking direction. The sad thing here is that the name of the army is the title of the book. And they are completely pointless to me. So even the title of the book has no direction.

In Conclusion

I want to say more for this book but nothing really comes to mind. It gets the largest “meh..” I could possibly give a book. I was more ready to move onto the next book in the series before this one was even over because I just got the overwhelming feeling that it was spinning it’s wheels in the mud. It was trying to get somewhere but was just stalling until the next book. This is 623 pages of loose ideas that happened to have a cover and a back to it. It’s a snooze fest and a massive let down from the rather well structured Stone of Tears book. Is it worth the read. That’s really hard to say. There are events that are important and it does appear to set up the next book in the series. I would say that if you tough it through this book maybe it will get better but I do not know yet myself. For the sake of getting through the entire series, I would say that this needs to be read. But if something ever possessed me to read through the series again, I would skip this book in a heartbeat.

If you want to see where this book ranks in the original series, you can find our Ranking the Sword of Truth series article here!