The middle book in a trilogy is always challenging. You've got to build on what made the first book good, while changing enough to keep things fresh, while setting up the end-game. City of Blades is a good, but lacks the absolute unity of purpose of the first book.

General Mulaghesh is called out of retirement for an inspection tour of Voortyashtan. Once the holy city of the fearsome Goddess of War, it's now the armpit of the continent, with a host of standard problems, like unruly natives and ambitious redevelopment projects, and weird problems, like the discovery of a strange alloy with super-conductive properties, and the madness and disappearance of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs agent.

Mulaghesh is plunged into a multi-sided intrigue, involving an old comrade in arms and war-crimes, Sigurd's daughter, a brilliant engineer and businesswoman, and the legacy of Voortya and the promise of the Final War. The plotting and characterization is solid, exactly what I'd expect, but the thematic unity isn't there.

Mulaghesh is haunted by the experience that made her a soldier, the Yellow March. When her unit got cut-off behind enemy lines, her commander (who is now the general in charge of Voortyashan) decided on a scorched earth strategy to disrupt enemy supply lines that quickly became a rolling massacre against civilians. The strategy won the war, but those with blood on her hand were swept aside by high command. Mulaghesh spent her career trying to right that wrong, on the premise that "a soldier serves". Her counterparts, the general in charge, the Goddess of War herself, believe that "a soldier takes." I'm not saying that I disagree with Bennett's argument here, but I do a lot of reading in this space, and I think that there's something more interesting to be said about the nature of an occupying military force on an indefinite mission to change a foreign culture, both in the universe of the Divine Cities, and as it related to our own unending War on Terror.

The good news is that Book 3 is right back on track.