A novella set after The Aeronaut’s Windlass, I read this one in a single evening. It had the same sense of action, the same well-developed characters (the cats, as always, were particularly entertaining), and the same intriguing locations. That said, I’m not sure I enjoyed it quite as much as the first book. Only one of the main characters from The Aeronaut’s Windlass has any significant screen time (though a few more make cameos), and I wasn’t as fond of the new team as I was of the first. Also, the whole novella hinges around a question that is never answered: what happened in Spire Dependence? I wish there had been a short epilogue in which that core question was answered (perhaps someone delivering a final report of some kind). Given that there isn’t, I’m REALLY hoping the answer comes up in book 2 (The Olympian Affair), or I’ll have just read 150 pages with no real sense of closure.