YMMV / The Ties That Bind (Hayes)

• Anticlimax Boss:
  • The witch we encounter early in the book is immortal and can tear through large numbers of guards. Darkheart just shoots her in the head with a magic bullet.
  • Jacob in The Color of Vengeance gets taken out by a massive number of soldiers without ever meeting the Blackthorn.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Anders proves to be one of these in the second book.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Some people consider Darkheart killing a child to be this.
  • Swift having his lover offered up as a Human Sacrifice or raping Henry to be this. It doesn't matter which as either event is enough to make you want this man deader than dead.
• The Scrappy: Drake Morrass swiftly turned off a lot of fans with his Smug Snake interference with the popular Thanquil/Jezzet romance. Then he got Jezzet killed.
• Squick: There are a lot of these moments in this book, one of the stand-out ones being Henry forcing the blackout drunk Anders to give her oral sex. Subverted in the fact he was only pretending to be drunk.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A lot of people can't get past Jezzet sleeping with an old lover due to the implied threat of his guards. This is at the start of the book. It gets much-much worse from there.