I did feel that
Bloodline had an almost visible "To Be Continued" at the end, but I didn't think of it as a particularly bad thing. It just keeps the excitement level up while we anxiously await the next episode.
As for "contrived" - no. I did not think anything about the end was contrived. It all made perfect sense when you look at it in terms of the series overall. Maybe someone not familiar with the larger themes could see it differently, but it rang true for me.
Finally, I just have to say that following the Repairman Jack series is not at all frustrating. Sure, there's a year of anticipation between books and each book seems to raise as many questions as it answers, but that's the FUN of it! And a year between installments is really not so long to wait.
I can't help but draw a comparison to Stephen King's
Dark Tower series. I read Book 1 of that series when my daughter was just a toddler. She was practically graduated from high school by the time the final book was released - and that series is only 6 books long. I invested
15 years in waiting for the end of that long story arc - and don't
even get me started on how it ended after all that time! Talk about frustration! Gaaahh!
The worst part was that Book 3 (
The Wastelands) ended with a HUGE cliffhanger and it was
six years before Book 4 was published! SIX YEARS!!! Gaaaahhhh!
Paul - you just keep doing what you're doing. The books are
wonderful and we wouldn't want you to compromise the overall story to try to fit somebody else's idea of what the individual books of a series should be. Besides - having already read both versions of
Nightworld I know you aren't going to disappoint us in the end, so the waiting is all that much easier to take.