Pathfinder Tales: "The Wizard's Mask" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

The Wizard's Mask is one of those books that starts off strong, full of excitement and action.  As I got through the first few exhilarating chapters, I couldn't fathom why it got so few stars in reviews.  But the further I got, the less I liked the novel.  Frankly, it was just exhausting following the main characters: there's a death-defying combat, chase, or rooftop leap on nearly every page.  It's like one of those airport bookstore thrillers, where every chapter has to end on a cliff-hanger even more unrealistic than the last.  The plot is needlessly opaque, and some of the twists are more confusing than interesting, in a "here we go again . . ." way.  Last, I'm not convinced the author had a very deep understanding of Golarion--at least compared to others like Dave Gross.  I like Ed Greenwood (I used to play around in the Forgotten Realms sandbox years ago), but The Wizard's Mask comes across like a Michael Bay Transformers movie: too much action, too little characterisation, and a sense of relief when it's finally, really, actually, over.

SPOILERS

The Wizard's Mask is set entirely in the warring countries of Nirmathas and Molthune.  The main characters are a halfling thing named Tantaerra and a character named only (at first) The Masked, who starts off as a rival before becoming a benefactor and then partner in crime.  Tantaerra and The Masked have a classic relationship of banter, insults, and attempts to outdo one another as they get chased all across Molhune, Nirmathas, and back and forth (seemingly endlessly) trying to stay one step ahead of the armies and inquisitors of each side.  The action, blood, and body count mount with almost every page, and I can only imagine those two warring countries are sparsely populated by the time the novel gets to an end.  But before that, there's a villain with confusing motivations named Arkholm (a.k.a., Orivin Voyvik) who continually turns up after suffering tremendous amounts of damage like a medieval Terminator.  The last quarter or so of the book involves The Masked's backstory and a voyage into a classic D&D dungeon (full of gruesome and diabolical traps) to confront a cliched evil wizard named Mahalgris.  A bunch of confusing stuff happens afterwards (swarms of dweomercats, body switching, a magic gauntlet that blasts a villain into becoming a tentacle monster?).  Frankly, I lost track of what was happening as there was just too much, as if Greenwood just sat down to write a chapter each day to continue a shaggy dog story for as long as he needed to until reaching the required page count.

As I said, it starts off well and the action scenes, taken individually, are quite good.  Players and GMs in the Ironfang Invasion Adventure Path could conceivably get a little useful background about Molthune and Nirmathas.  But apart from that, I just don't see a lot of value in The Wizard's Mask.  The pacing is frantic, there's little depth in setting or characterization, and I didn't really care what happened when I got to the end.  In short, it's a poor example of a Pathfinder Tales book and of fantasy literature in general.