I also think this book suffers in some ways from being the series’s Empire Strikes Back. Geist was more a stand-alone novel, and Spectyr set up what’s going on in Wrayth. But Wrayth is clearly a ramp-up to the showdown with the true Big Bad (who, by the way, I was most emphatically not expecting when s/he was revealed), and once I realized that, I think in some ways it negatively impacted my enjoyment of the story.