LKH is a particularly bad case, but she's far from the only serial author to include "Previously on..." statements scattered throughout the books. Drives me crazy, as I figure if you're going to read a book from the series, you should make the 5 seconds of effort to figure out which one comes first, or just suck it up that you don't know who people are or what happened.

Alternately, I guess it's good if you've been following the series in real-time so that it's been at least a year since you may have read the previous installation, but still...

And if it's a publisher-preferred thing, they could just put a little summary page in the front of the book for reference! Gyar.

/sorry, pet peeve