Reckless

A woman crosses a desert with a bow, a journal and a stolen name, and the man hunting her is the one person who would recognise her from behind.

A pursuit was promised and a pursuit is what runs. Roberts follows a regicide with a chase, out of the capital, across scorched country, into a city where nobody has powers and an Ordinary is finally unremarkable.

A compromised pursuer has to be enough. Kai is the Enforcer, under orders, entirely competent, and unwilling to succeed. Either that tension between duty and refusal sustains a novel or the reader spends four hundred pages watching a man decline to do the thing he was dispatched for.

A hunter in love cannot frighten anybody, and the consequence follows directly. The chase has no jeopardy because the person conducting it is compromised from the first chapter, so capture stops being a threat and becomes a scheduling matter. Tension therefore has to come from duty, duty is internal, and internal states produce conversation rather than event. The middle stretch is two people in proximity deciding not to act on it.

Kai catches up. Kai does not take her in. Kai keeps finding reasons to delay a decision he made before he left, and Roberts is better on the mechanics of that self-deception than on the pursuit it is attached to.

Dor is the best invention the trilogy has. A city without Elites, where the advantage Paedyn has spent her life concealing simply does not signify, and somebody who has spent years performing a power she does not have gets to stop.

Kitt writes letters from home and the letters are the volume's oddest and best material. A new king, alone, composing correspondence to the woman who killed his father, and the reader watching a man construct a version of events he can survive.

The brand is the detail Roberts handles best. A mark left on a body by a dead man, discovered by somebody who loved neither of them, and the reaction is anger rather than pity, which is the right choice.

Middle volumes carry a known burden and this one does not disguise it. Positions get moved, backstory arrives, the finale's furniture is installed, and a reader can see the setup being performed rather than the story being told.

Sheer bulk is the honest complaint here. The distance covered does not require the pages spent covering it, and a tighter book with the same events would have lost nothing except the middle.

The target here is somebody who wants two people near each other and unable to say so, and on that specific promise the volume delivers steadily and at length.

He was sent to bring her back. Both of them knew how that would end before he left.