My thoughts:

As is often the case, Garak wound up being one of my favorite things in this novel!

Final thoughts:

More about Inferno:

Also by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens:

marks the conclusion of thetrilogy, three books that unironically embody the word "epic." Perhaps it's a cliche that so manyadventures involve the "end of the universe as we know it," and of course we all know that the universe won't really be destroyed. So, fittingly, at the end of the last novel,, all of creation is... destroyed.How do you come back from that?At the beginning of the novel, each of our characters are living their own "personal hell," constructed for them by the Pah-Wraiths. We soon come to understand the unreality of these situations as, one-by-one, they are pulled out into what the multi-verse has become: a sort of strange purgatory, seemingly inside the red wormhole. I'm glad the authors didn't linger too long on each of the characters' vision of hell; Jake Sisko's in particular, in which every word he wrote was being erased, quickly catching up to him as he wrote, was truly horrific. I still shudder visibly when thinking about it.What impressed me the most aboutwas that it answered all of the questions raised in the first two novels in a surprisingly satisfying fashion. While reading the previous book, I got that feeling that's similar to the one I got when first watching "The Best of Both Worlds": how the heck are they going to get out of this? Unlike that famous cliffhanger episode, however, the authors had a clear plan for the resolution of this story going in.I see a number of reviewers online decrying this story as a convoluted mess of time travel, and I can certainly see how someone would come to that conclusion. While most of the time I readfiction as pure escapism, I appreciate a good story that requires you to think. And, if nothing else, requires you to engage your brain and pay attention. It is extremely easy to get lost in the myriad twists and turns, with some of the plot points seeming to come out of nowhere. However, the entire trilogy is meticulously crafted and requires the reader to pay very close attention for it all to make sense. I must admit that some plot points flew light-years over my head the first time, and it took a closer reading to make everything make sense. But eventually, make sense it does.Seemingly minor plot details dropped into the story in the first book pay off with surprising significance in book three, while other moments will make the reader slap his or her head and say, "so *that's* what that meant!" In the end, many of the situations the characters face in the course of the trilogy seem to have been engineered specifically by a particular group who knew how things were "supposed" to play out. This struck me as amusing, as one can cast the authors of these novels in those roles, almost as a sort of "fourth-wall" break.I realize that this review has veered away from a typical discussion of the plot and has become a little more abstract; I suppose that is a reflection of the sort of book this is. It's difficult to discuss elements of the plot in great detail as I feel that would multiply the length of this review significantly. Instead, I will highlight a couple of scenes that stood out to me. First, we get a version of Garak interacting with his future self. I absolutely loved this part of the story, and I would have loved to have seen Andrew Robinson tackle this. One Garak is terrific, while two is very nearly perfection.Also, I have to highlight a scene in which Odo converses with Vic Fontaine on an empty and abandoned. This part was surprisingly touching and poignant, with the two characters reflecting on reality and their ultimate fates. Vic Fontaine, for being a hologram, was a character that brought a lot of humanity to, and his character is used to great effect here.wraps up thetrilogy in a more satisfying manner than I honestly expected. Some readers will certainly be put off by the very complex and interweaving plot twists and turns, but the Reeves-Stevenses have obviously worked very hard to make everything line up correctly. This is a novel (and a trilogy) that requires the reader to pay close attention, as even the smallest plot details end up being significant and play out in unexpected ways. However, even if all aspects of the story aren't completely understood by the reader, I was left feeling thatwas a satisfying conclusion to the overall story.