Jean Lowe Carlson

I went back and forth on how I felt about this story throughout the whole book. There are many POV characters, and some of them had similar name so this was a tiring aspect to keep track of. Many scenes are just fluff, and don't add to the story, where as many more could have replaced them to fill in more of the backstory on characters who were labeled as important but not given any real weight. Or romances that were rushed that shouldn't have been, etc.

The base story is intriguing, and has a lot of potential but the book had a lot of 'first novel' errors that kept drawing me out, all the way to the end with an 'epilogue' that should have just been labeled Chapter 39. The author never uses the dialogue tag 'said'. This was the most taxing error. Friends do not say their friends names inside dialogue when they are speaking to them. The adjective level is high in dialogue scenes, and make it hard to stay engrossed in the action. The characters are constantly murmuring, nodding, sniffing, etc. Just use said.

The world build, and layers of treason are all well crafted, all the way up to the various layers to the kingsmen. At it's core there is a great story here.… (meer)