I read it when I was a teenager, so it's been a bit. I really liked the first book. After that I liked the stories less and less. Without too many spoilers, Richard is a special kind of wizard, and besides one brief moment for one section of a story, he never learns how to use his wizard powers. They mostly just turn up whenever he needs to dues ex machina his way out of a situation he can't fix with his sword. He's also an artist so he just gets artistic inspiration on how to fix things and it felt like a cop out most of the time. The soft core torture porn themes of the books didn't bother me, I was a teenager so I was probably into it at the time. The main characters just got less interesting to me over time. The side characters were great though. Zed? Loved that guy.

To be fair, that's a cool looking bird.