This, the sequel to Fool’s Errand, is possibly my favorite Hobb to date…possibly because Hobb’s hero, FitzChivalry Farseer, finally seems to be gaining some wisdom. The book advances the plot tolerably well for the middle book of a series, and leaves me quite curious to know how the story turns out.
One word of caution: there are some spoilers in this book for Hobb’s Liveship Traders trilogy, of which I’d only read the first volume when I read Golden Fool; The Liveship Traders books are still in print, and you probably should read them all before this one.
The View from the Foothills 
I would definitely concur with the suggestion to read the Liveship series first.
The Six Duchies and Bingtown/Jamalia are so far removed geographically that the inhabitants share very little in the way of any kind of common culture–at times it seems they could be totally different worlds.
I enjoyed how Hobb’s brought characters from both trilogies into this one. I rather hope she’ll continue and write one more book (if not trilogy) from the point-of-view of the traders and their interactions with Fitz and the Six Duchies.
In the realm of “joint sequeles,” besides Hobb’s, the only other that I can think of (and have read) is David Morrell’s The League of Night and Fog where the characters from The Brotherhood of the Rose and The Fraternity of the Stone join up. I imagine there must be more examples…
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Tim Powers has done much the same thing with Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather; the first two were not obviously related until the third drew the whole story together.
I’m not familiar with David Morrell; what’s his stuff like?
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David Morrell writes a lot of thriller/espionage type novels. His first novel was eventually made into the movie Rambo. (I’ve read the book but never seen any of the movies, so I don’t know whether they’re faithful to one another.)
Morrell, along with Baldacci, Grisham, and others are among my “airport authors”–I make it a habit to get to the airport with enough time to swing by the airport book shop and buy some genre fiction for the flight.
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