Reading Dilemma

I'm having a bit of a problem with some of my books. Well, besides that fact that Naomi Novik's Victory of Eagles doesn't come out in small-version paperback until May. May. C'mon people, you're killing me here!

I remember talking with one of my gulide members a few years ago. The only series we'd read in common was by author Robert Jordan, his Wheel of Time books. I'd enjoyed the first few but had had trouble getting my hands on the next ones. He said he'd read until book number eight, but stopped. When I asked why he told me it was because he'd gone straight from book six tho the one he'd just finished and never noticed that he skipped number seven in the process. We both agreed that it was probably time to stop reading the series you completely miss a book and don't notice or miss not having read it.

Well, I've been reading a recent series by Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis and I've done just that. I was waiting for so long for book number three to come out that when I saw another book in the series I went so far as to buy it in hardback. Apparently I fell victim to the missing volume plague (Ever gone into every bookstore in your area looking for a middle volume in a series and none fo them have it?).

The first few chapters of what I now know is the fourth book in the series were a bit conusing, but Lackey at least is prone to that. It's a technique a lot of fantasy authors (or perhaps authors in general) use: jump ahead a few years from the last book and treat one or two major events that occurred in between like some great secret for the reader to figure out. Now it would be very silly to expect every book to start up where the last one left off, but most are able to find a good segway to catch the reader up without leaving us deliberately confused for half the book.

The point is I never realized things were terribly off until I saw the third book on the shelf of a Barnes&Noble half a year later. Thus my dilemma. I'll certainly read the two books that I already have, but if there are any more do I keep reading them? The answer depends on how these twp redeem themselves, and how on earth they managed to deal with that problem in Alhambra.