The books are just okay. They're page turners, but have major problems. For one thing, the author feels the need to explain everything in its entirety every single solitary time the subject comes up. I'm talking to the point that it starts to feel like a deliberate hoax. Just one of about a billion examples (no significant spoiler here): There's this pirate/smuggler-turned-straight guy who was knighted by a lord because he used his criminal skills to smuggle food into a besieged castle, the inhabitants of which (including the lord in question) were about to starve. This saved the day, but the highly principled lord could not allow the smuggler's previous crimes to go unpunished. So he cut off the ends of the guy's fingers on one hand, and also knighted him. From then on, the guy wears the bones from his fingers in a pouch around his neck for luck, and to remind him of how far he's come in life and so on.
So anyway, this guy habitually and unthinkingly reaches up and fondles the pouch around his neck whenever he is faced with an unpleasant situation or decision (which is pretty much always). And EVERY, SINGLE, TIME it goes like this:
Davos reached up and fondled for luck the bag of bones hanging from his neck. His fingers had been cut off to the first knuckle as punishment for his previous crimes when Lord Stannis knighted him for saving his castle from starvation when it was besieged by so-and-so.
Like seriously one page later it will say something like:
Davos still carried the bones of his amputated fingers in a pouch around his neck. When the pirate smuggled food into the castle in the dead of night, Lord Stannis paid for the former acts of piracy by cutting off the tips of the fingers on one hand, and for the latter act of salvation he granted him knighthood and Davos became a trusted friend and advisor. Davos always wore the bag for luck.
And then over and over and over, throughout the book, literally every time Davos is spoken of, the author explains that Davos carries his finger bones around his neck, as well as how and why he came to carry them around his neck. Every time. I'm totally not kidding. I'm talking at least twenty, but probably more like fifty or a hundred times this is explained. And the author does it with everything. I wonder if it's because he used to write for television and he got so used to always having to write, "Previously, on ________ . . . ." So now he can't help but incorporate that concept into all of his books, as though people might just randomly pick up his book for the first time and just start reading at a random location. It's super weird and annoying.
Oh yeah, similarly, he needlessly explains everything. He coddles readers (read: insults their intelligence) by explaining utterly obvious things, like why a grossly obvious ironic situation that he just described is ironic, or why a character seems pleased by the ruin of his arch-enemy and constant tormentor, and so on. It's like he thinks of himself as extraordinarily clever and he's always following everything he says with, "Did you see what I did there?" Unsurprisingly, the books are extremely (and needlessly) long. But they're still sort of fun reads if you ignore the annoying stuff.
Also, the last (so far) book is awful.