With The Ruin of Angels, Gladstone shifts The Craft Sequence into a new major arc. The first books stood on their own as fantasy-legal-thrillers, but now he's aiming higher, with the fate of the entire world at stake. The magical technology that sustains the setting is burning through necromantic earths and human souls at a dangerous pace, and something has to give.

The city of Alikand is one place where that something has already given. The first Master of the Craft, Gerhardt, waged war against the gods here 150 years ago. The gods killed him, but he refused to die, and the aftermath wore a hole in Reality, for lack of a better term. The city was reconstructed by the Iskari, squid cultists who unblinkingly observe a new city of Agdal Lex, on top of but not the same as the ruins of Alikand. Agdal Lex is a trade center across the wastes, and a hot startup scene for artists and dreamworkers inventing more user friendly forms of communication than the nightmare telegraph. And there's a lively criminal underworld of refugees and renegade archivists delving artifacts from dead Alikand.

Kai Pohala (from Five Fathoms Deep) arrives in Agdal Lex to make some deals, invest some money. Her sister Ley is there, and Ley is in massive trouble, tied up with a Craft startup with covert funding from the Iskari squid cultists that could save or destroy the world. Zeddig is a delver still in love with Ley. And everybody is going to put it all on their line to get what they want: love, and power, and a world remade.

This is the most ambitious Craft book yet, and the longest. The plot sometimes got lost in descriptive writing, though Gladstone is talented enough that it's okay. I think the biggest problem is in the characters. Ley is the protagonist, in that she initiates the action, but she's a cipher for much of the book. It works to the extent that you buy Kai and Zeddig's need to save Ley. If this love feels artificial sometimes, well, love doesn't need to make sense.