I picked this up based on an absolutely glowing review from Tamsyn Muir, and I'll just say that while there is a lot that worked in this book, there's also a lot that didn't.

So what worked? Yat Jyn-Hok is bad cop in a weird city. She used to be a roof-rat, scavenging and stealing to survive, and somehow wound up a cop, where she thinks that she can apply a smidgen of mercy to help people who used to be like her (that's the bad cop part). Yat is also a Bisexual Disaster (TM) in a homophobic culture, pining over a lost love, and addicted to a hallucinogenic drug. Her city, Hainak of walls and gardens, runs on biological alchemy, with fungal houses, living tissue grafts, and guns that shoot neurotoxic borer grubs. Hainak has a troubled past, with revolution, war, and the bones of an old world of steel and brick beneath the flesh of the new.

So there's a really great low fantasy story there, with a morally ambiguous cop who stumbles onto a floating corpse and conspiracy bigger than she is, except that that's where the story abruptly shift into high fantasy, as Yat is shot in the head and brought back by the Trickster God Monkey. Along with a crew of similarly sorcerous pirates, she has to fight against other immortals and the mad Crane God and his cult. All of the delicious world-building and character work gets obliterated by yet another boring power fantasy.

So yeah, on a sentence to sentence level Stronach has a solid voice and clear talent, and he sets up something really cool, but I feel like this book is a gourmet meal that the waiter drops right as he gets to the table. And that promise betrayed is worse than a book that's clearly mediocre from the start.