Melanie Blaze/Harry's heritage (From a Drood to a Kill spoilers!)
- So Melanie Blaze is a pureblood elf. That explains why the Droods didn't pull off an amazing search-and-rescue despite their clear capabilities and her being the love of their golden boy's life, and why everybody's so squirrely about her. But that also makes Harry a half-elf, unless something really weird went down while he was being conceived. So how did nobody notice that? The old Matriarch sure had reason to keep it quiet, and most Droods probably don't have a reason to look that closely at one of their own, but Eddie and Molly have both the chops and the suspicion of Harry required. Speaking of which, did he not get any cool powers like Blue? Did he deliberately suppress them in favor of the torc, to be more like his dad? And why does Melanie act like she had no reason to try to come back after James's death when she had a son?
- Possibly Melanie wasn't just an elf disguised as a human, but one genuinely transformed into one right down to the genetic level. She and human James could therefore produce a normal human child, same as Ishmael Jones could father a normal human son (the Colonel), despite his alien origin.
- Alternately, it's possible that James was married more than once, probably in a loveless arranged pairing like Martha had wanted Eddie to commit to in the first book. Melanie Blaze was James's one true love, but it's never explicitly stated that she was his only wife; once she disappeared, he'd face a lot of familial pressure to remarry to a "proper" human bride and sire some heirs who could actually wear a torc. This could explain Melanie's failure to even mention Harry, who may have been born after she went missing.
The Lazarus Stone shouldn't break time.
- Eddie says he can't use the Lazarus Stone to resurrect James or Molly's parents, because it would change everything that happened since their deaths. Except when the Stone was first introduced, it was explained that the Stone pulls whoever you ask for from the moment of their death directly to the moment at which you activate it. So nothing in the intervening years should really change, unless we're going very deep into a butterly-flaps-its-wings chaos-theory type of deal and the body being missing alters the course of history. Obviously, the real reason Eddie gets rid of the Lazarus Stone is that having it around is narratively inconvenient for a lot of reasons (ranging from "author probably not interested in this plot" to "James needs to stay dead for thematic cohesion re: Eddie being his heir"), but that doesn't explain the inconsistency in-universe.
- It doesn't help that the Greenverse has numerous established entities who play around with time in ways similar to the Lazarus Stone without breaking it. (Good examples being Old Father Time, Count Video and the Jonah, the latter of whom managed to erase the entirety of his own history by selecting the one chance in which he was never born without causing any adverse changes in the timeline.) The idea of the Lazarus Stone causing any sort of change in history seems completely arbitrary in light of that.
Perpetually-crowded Hall
- The Droods supposedly lose several hundred of their troops in both Daemons Are Forever and From Hell With Love, followed by dozens more in various other books. Yet, even in the immediate wake of two decimating secret wars, Eddie still goes on and on about Drood Hall being stuffed to the gills, with even Council members living in rooms the size of a low-end hotel single or crashing on cots in their workspace. Sure, eventually the family's regular birthing of twins will make up for the losses, but the series itself only covers a few years' time, in-Verse, so excess babies born after the Heart's destruction would still be in diapers or dormitories by Night Fall. So what happened to all those vacant rooms, whose occupants got killed by Loathly Ones or Accelerated Men...?
Forgotten Precedence
- Despite her insistence that she hates being Matriarch, Capability Maggie doesn't consider tracking down Eddie's missing parents to be a priority, dragging her feet so much that he and Molly resort to breaking into the Sanctity just to convince her to consider the idea. But by the Droods' own rules of precedence, Eddie's mother Emily - Martha Drood's only daughter - should be rightful heir to the Matriarchy! So you'd think Maggie would jump at the chance to track down her missing cousin and restore Emily's status within the family, if only so she can cede the job of boss Drood to Eddie's mum and get back to her beloved gardens. Yet not only does this apparently never cross her mind, but Eddie (who's perfectly aware Maggie was forced to accept leadership) never thinks of it either.
