My best advice for those of you picking up this book for the first time is: stick with it. This book just drops you in, before you’ve found the things you’ll want to come back for, and the author doesn’t spoon feed those to us, but lets them reveal themselves over the course of the book.

This book’s strength is its characters, combined with the author’s ability to pull them through situations and places that, especially at first, we might not suspect. I went from mildly interested to, when I finished the book, lamenting that it will take longer than I prefer for the author to return to these characters (fortunately, I love the series the author will return to next, so I can’t begrudge him the time — even if I wish there were two of him!)