There's plenty of scope if so (the book ends with Kellanved crowned but only a very small part of Quon Tali under his control), and it'd be interesting to fill the gaps in between this book and Night of Knives (set roughly 100 years later), where Kellanved's plans are finally fully realised.
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I suspect it will be even more frustrating as - if as seems possible - more books in this series follow Path to Ascendancy was contracted for three books but the series has sold extremely well, so it may be extended.
There's still much to enjoy here, of course, even if the later chapters of the book do start feeling more like a plot summary than a novel. But around the halfway mark the pace accelerates and suddenly major plot events are whizzing by like they've been shot out of a machine gun. The early chapters, which relax a little to focus on the military campaigns on opposite coasts of the continent, are well-written and excellent, and it's fun to see future important characters like Greymane and Skinner arise from the masses to start their own steps down the road to destiny.
This is a shame because the improvement in Esslemont's writing and character voice which has been building since Dancer's Lament continues apace here. Massive, major events (like the nascent empire's capture of the strategically vital city of Cawn) take place in sentences, let along paragraphs, and the epic final battle which ends with Kellanved's crowning feels perfunctory at best. There simply isn't enough room to do this justice and as a result we end up bouncing back and forth between characters and stories like a pinball machine. The book is only 330 pages long (barely a third as long as some of Erikson's books) and Esslemont tries to fit into this modest page count no less than five major military campaigns, a major subplot with Kellanved and Dancer exploring the Shadow Realm and the stories of numerous POV characters.
If one word comes to mind when reading Kellanved's Reach it is "rushed". Kellanved's seizure of the First Throne, his alliance with the T'lan Imass and the military campaigns which saw the Malazan Empire start coming together have been referenced in hushed tones throughout the sixteen novels of both of Erikson and Esslemont's original series, so to see those events first-hand is thrilling. The events described in this trilogy, and in this single novel especially, are vast, epic and the stuff of myth. Following on from Dancer's Lament and Deadhouse Landing, this book continues the story of Kellanved and Dancer, the founders of the Malazan Empire. Kellanved's Reach is the third novel in Ian Esslemont's Path to Ascendancy series, which acts as a prequel to both the Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence by Steven Erikson and Esslemont's own earlier Malazan Empire series.
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