After Cold Fire, the class politics and murders in this book were, honestly, refreshing.
It's always interesting to see what Pierce takes in and takes on in her books. They're not polemics, although there are always elements of real-world injustices that obviously inspire her. And the Emelan books don't feel like they overly simplify things - yet this books comes the closest to doing that.
I think the dual narratives of "baby mages get apprentices" and "gotta solve the murder" help balance the two because you can have resolutions to those plots without necessarily resolving the cultural stuff. And yet the more Pierce writes, the more you see both her grasp on the complexity of said cultural elements and her desire to write the stories that take them on.