Karsa is definitely full of awesome. And I read in an interview with Erikson that one of the other stories he's going to do within this world will be a trilogy focused on him I believe after the events of the main series.

@kasper11

Keep reading! Book three goes back to many of the characters from book one and introduces some new and pretty freaking epic ones too. The fourth book begins with a new story line that introduces another awesome character and then picks up where book two left off. That's as far as I've gotten but, like Luckers said, I feel like I now have a much better grasp on the world and how things work. Also, the people at the malazanempire.com forums are very helpful and the forum its self is divided into subforums for each book so it's spoiler friendsly (for example, when you've finished book two you can go to that specific part of the forum without worrying about spoilers from subsequent books). Great series so far. I just hope I can finish it before aDwD comes out so I don't have to pause between books!

As of 9 hours ago they are giving away 4 copies. Just saw this on their Facebook page.