The Craft series began with dizzyingly cool worldbuilding: what if magic was like law and finance? But at it's heart it always been about choices, and this prequel novel focuses on the choices of two veterans of the godswars. Elayne Kevarian was a teenage killer who saved the life of a man in the last battle, and is now a lawyer-at-large for the skeletal King in Red who rules Desidal Lex. The man she saved, Temoc, was once last of the Eagle Knights, and is now a husband and father. When protests over an urban renewal project in a slowly dying residential district threaten to rise to open violence, Elayne and Temoc put aside old hatreds to try and bargain a compromise solution.

It all seems to be holding, until the developer behind it all is shot, a cop kills a kid, and protests turn into riots and a camp turns into a siege zone. Elayne and Temoc have to decide where their loyalties lie. Elayne sides with the protesters against her boss, but (spoilers) comes away more or less unharmed, and Temoc (if you've read Two Serpents Rise) picks the sacrificial knife back up and restarts the old wars as a hunted terrorist.

Good, but not great, this is a prequel that doesn't grab at my favorite bits of the setting, which is the way the Craft dehumanizes people, and the cutting little contracts Craftsmen make with each other. Temoc's old school Mesoamerican death cult thing is kinda meh. Definitely read these books in publication order.