Mouse? What happened to the Dragon?

Some of you know that I am a fan of Jeff Stone's Five Ancestors series. I love the story, the main characters, the kung fu, and as a writer, I am extremely impressed by the opening of the first book in the series, Tiger.

The premise: four young and highly-trained martial arts masters are forced out of their temple home when one of their former brothers burnt it down and killed their master in search of a special scroll. Each book in the series is devoted to one of the young masters, whose style of martial arts is based on one of these animals: tiger, monkey, snake, crane, and dragon. If you look that covers of the books, you'll see the insignia of these five animals.

After devouring the first four books in the series, I eagerly awaited the fifth, which I had anticipated to be about the dragon and the last book in the series.

But that fifth book was Eagle, not dragon; and it wasn't the last book. So I grumbled a little, but accepted Eagle because the errant brother was originally trained in the eagle style kung fu even though he wants nothing more than to be a dragon.

At the library the other day, I saw the newest installment of this series, and not only is it still not the last book, its title is Mouse, a character who was introduced only in book 5! Can they create detours like that?

What am I to do? Can't not read it! So I grumbled: where is the kung fu? And why is the dragon scroll now so insignificant when it propelled the earlier books? And just where did that jade armor come from?

Mouse redeemed himself towards the end with some well-placed snot, an over-ambitious imitation of a kung-fu move, and lots of spunk.

All right, Jeff Stone, the next one had better be Dragon (an ad at the back of Mouse says it is but I"ll believe it when I see it) and there had better be more kung fu (not more violence though) and no more introduction of an extremely powerful and important artifact that was not mentioned before.

End of vent.