Morning Star gets us to the firework factory. Actual revolution! Of course there's the little problem of the ending of the last book, with Ares/Kitchner dead, Darrow captured, and the forces of evil triumphant. Brown apparently had a similar problem, and this book begins to sprawl and lose focus.

So anyway, back on topic, Darrow is imprisoned and tortured for a year when the Sons of Ares break him out of prison. Turns out that the revolution is not in as bad of shape as it might seen. Sevro has stepped into the Ares role, Mustang and the fleet are in the wind, and rebel groups are striking across the solar system. The rebellion has a secret base in a city, but they're still losing. They need leadership and a strategy to win.

As might be expected, Darrow takes the lead in a series of bold strikes, first to Phobos to hit Helium-3 shipments that the system relies on, then to the Martian antarctic to gain the allegiance of the fearsome Obsidian warrior tribes, to the Moons of Jupiter to take out a former friend leading the government's major mobile fleet, and finally to the Moon, to confront Empress Octavia Au Lune herself, and end this thing once and for all.

It's good, but the plot feels slightly overstuffed, like there was one more act. And the setting begins breaking down under the limits of Darrow as a viewpoint. His coalition is fragile, held together by a handful of personalities. He needs the renegade Golds and fierce Obsidian to act as shocktroops, high colors like Silvers and Blues to handle logistics and tech, and low colors like Reds to round out numbers, do the dirty work, and give moral weight to the whole enterprise. But the focus, again and again, is can individual Golds be redeemed, not the justice of whatever comes next. Revolution is easy, compared to sticking the new society that comes next, as the French, Russians, and Chinese know.

Aside from some structural floppiness, Darrow has a signature move of making a sacrifice to get shocktroops in close and do an effective decapitation strike. It's a dramatic move, and pretty effective so far, but I think Brown needs to mix it up a little. I can sense sprawl setting in, which is good because Darrow's story is reaching an end, but bad because so much of what makes the series bounce is tied up in Darrow's rage and quest to be the best.