Book Review: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

Queen Demon is the sequel to Witch King by Martha Wells, part of the The Rising World series. I picked it up on discount to check it out, even though it wasn't my favorite series. Here is the blurb from Goodreads:

Dahin believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them, travel with him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may be dangerously close to finding the Well itself. 

Can Kai stop the rise of a new Hierarch?

And can he trust his companions to do what’s right?

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Overall Impression

This was a bit of a hard book to get into. The start is slow with lots of information thrown at you, perhaps reading immediately after Witch King may be recommended so the information is fresh. The characters have grown on me a bit between this book and Witch King, though I would have preferred different viewpoints. Overall, a decent book if you're invested into the world and its characters, but read the prior book first.

Plot

This book started a bit slow and very dense. I didn't remember a lot from the prior book, yet we start here with all of that context needed plus an alternating present/past timeline (similar to the last book). It took me reaching about a third of the book before I felt that I had a sense of the direction the plot was going. Once things started clicking I felt more involved, but at times it seemed like I was reading two separate books at once. The two timelines shared characters, as many are long-lived/immortal, but the narrative ties between them weren't super clean other than for character development.

Characters

We have pretty much the same cast of characters are the prior book, with a heavy focus on the main character Kai. This book focuses a little more on Dahin, the Lesser Blessed brother of Tahren, while the prior one focused more on the witch Ziede, Tahren's partner. It was an interesting dynamic between the four, since it sometimes feels like Dahin is treated like a "fourth" wheel, given that Kai, Ziede, and Tahren are all very powerful, competent fighters, and Dahin is just a scholar. I would have liked to have different point of view characters since while Kai is fine, it felt very similar to the prior book.

Setting / World Building

In the past, we see Kai in Bashasa's army as they struggle against the Hierarchs in the budding, but fragile Rising World coalition. There are discussions of the nature of witches and demons, but feels like an addendum to what we learned from the prior book. In the present, we see Kai and friends handling political intrigue being caused by Bashat (similar name, but completely separate character) and a mystery that drives them to another part of the world. This was the more engaging timeline, in my opinion.

Both timelines revolve around the power of the Hierarchs, the main villains of the past. We also get to see a bit more of the Blessed, thanks to Dahin and Tahren, than the prior book. It's interesting to me how the world building is rather detailed and sprawling, but the adventure itself is very focused on what feels like a relatively small tasks. I was reminded of some books in the Malazan series, where for example the whole plot is them marching to capture a city, but it's the relationships between the characters that drive the story.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this was a decent book. I picked it up in discount while I was waiting for a different book to release. I do think the characters have made enough of an impact that I remembered the main character (Kai), but the story and the relationship between the secondary characters was all lost to me. I had to review what happened in the prior book and still felt a bit lost until about a third of the way through. After that, though, the story was interesting and I got a good handle of the plot and the implications on the larger story of the series.