Questions of trust, trauma, loyalty, and territory, for readers who enjoy lie-infused romance. Kazi and Jase seem white by default a few characters are noted as brown-skinned. However, Pearson’s plotting is solid, and the last section picks up steam, ending on a cryptic cliffhanger that begs the sequel to hurry. The action and reveals have strong content but little punch, and the romance is overwritten (“I was dancing with fire and hoping not to get burned”). Kazi and Jase’s meet-cute is a meet-slam (her knife at his throat), and, of course, while chained together by kidnappers and deceiving each other incessantly, they fall in love. There are ongoing, possibly rogue, threats to their home, city, and trade arena. Tor’s Watch is politically unrecognized by the other kingdoms, and although the Ballengers refuse to demarcate their borders, they’re fiercely territorial. The war criminal may be hiding at Tor’s Watch, where the ancient Ballenger Dynasty is newly led by 19-year-old Jase Ballenger. One soldier is 17-year-old Kazi, formerly “an invisible street rat” of Venda, who honed her consummate thieving skills after her mother was kidnapped into (probable) sex slavery. Six years after the war described in The Beauty of Darkness (2016), the queen of Venda sends three top soldiers to hunt down a war criminal.

An elite soldier and the head of an unacknowledged dynasty fall in love while telling each other lie after lie.

Dance of thieves mary e pearson