Edge of Eternity

I loved the first two books in this series as was among the first people to put my name on the hold list for this, but despite being ready to love it, I was quite disappointed.
Admittedly, writing a massive historical piece about the politics of the 60s and 70s has many more challenges than writing about the World War eras; specifically there was no single all-encompassing war to write around, but multiple loosely connected events. But Follett for whatever reason felt the need to get characters personally involved in every major event, which created a series of scattered and totally unrealistic story lines with very little cohesiveness or character development.
The interactions between families felt forced and unnecessary unlike in the previous stories, and his attempt at writing conservative characters who did not come off as evil was a total failure. Do I regret reading this? No. The parts that concluded the stories of the original characters was very touching and I was satisfied with how everything was tied up. But as a stand-alone novel, this book really dropped the ball.