Review: The Empress

The Empress by S.J. Kincaid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me a little while, after picking this book up at long last, to recall some of the details of its predecessor, The Diabolic. Between looking at my own review and others, I was able to pick enough up to go forward in this book, which is a good thing because while The Empress is its own beast of action and intrigue and thrills, you do kinda need to have read The Diabolic first.

However, while this book does tend to flag just a bit in the middle - thus keeping me from giving it the five-star rating I really want to give it - it does have one advantage over its predecessor. While The Diabolic was carefully constructed to work equally well as a standalone or as the start of a new series, The Empress makes its status as part of a series very, very clear, especially towards the end when Kincaid slathers on some twists that I didn't see coming and, frankly, am still hoping are somehow fake. Though it's not exactly an Aveyardian ending, it combines just enough aspects of the endings of Glass Sword and King's Cage both to be a diabolical style all its own, a uniquely unduplicatable form of enraging ending which I will now call the "Kincaidian cliffhanger."

"Unduplicatable," but for how long?

(I'll just wait for the likes of Victoria Schwab or Leigh Bardugo to ask Kincaid to hold their beer.)

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