The Serpent's Shadow

The Serpent's Shadow is a fantasy adventure novel by Rick Riordan and the third and final book of The Kane Chronicles, published in 2012. It begins about six months after the previous volume and returns to Carter and Sadie Kane, who narrate alternate chapters of the account.

The task the siblings face is to defeat Apophis before he escapes the underworld, and the method they are given is unusual: they must find a way to destroy a god's shadow, which requires knowledge from people who are not on their side. The novel moves between the magicians' base in Brooklyn, the underworld and a set of other locations, and it resolves the question of which of their allies can be trusted.

Riordan closes the series by bringing its cast together and by making the final conflict depend on the rules the earlier books established. The trilogy as a whole sets Egyptian myth alongside the Greek series he had already written, with the same mixture of humour and mythological invention, and it ends the sequence rather than leaving it open.