Big juicy epic grimdark fantasy about a bandit who conquered an empire, became queen, faked her own death and retired to become mayor of a small village for twenty years. And then our story begins. One quick murder and massacre later and Zosia is back on the warpath, heading off to round up her five old Villains and scrounge up and army and start a war to take down an empire all over again, as you do. Things go as well as you might expect with lies and betrayal and a diverting side-quest to rescue a missing princess, and yet by the time we're halfway through the book, war is pretty much a certainty

Despite its arresting opening, this doesn't quite grab traction as much as it should, not for a while anyway. There's plenty to keep you interested, with the worldbuilding and the characters, but it feels loose and sprawly until the multiple narrative strands start to come together in the last two hundred pages or so. Nonetheless it's well-written and not as grindingly, relentlessly grimdark as you might expect. The volume ends just as the world is going definitively to some kind of hell, so one might hope for a tighter, faster, even nastier bit of pandemonium in volume two.