I really enjoyed "The Traveler" and had high hopes for the full Fourth Realm Trilogy, but this was a terrible ending to the series. Even more than the first two books, The Golden City comes across as heavy-handed, reactionary conspiracy theory, driven by the author's own paranoia. I would be ok with this if it weren't 350+ pages of non-compelling writing lacking both elegance and presence. I was continually annoyed by the repetition of the same phrases and metaphors over and over, a problem compounded by the fact that this is the third book to use some of these hackneyed expressions. In general, this is a very dissatisfying conclusion to what began as a potentially great modern fantasy trilogy.