“The Alloy of Law” by Brandon Sanderson

This is another free ebook that I got from Tor.com. I didn’t realize that this author worked on the Wheel of Time series! That made me pretty excited to dive in.

This is essentially a steampunk mystery novel about Wax, a lawman who has spent time in the Roughs until accidentally shooting his partner and coming home to settle down. His old friend Wayne comes to annoy him about a villainous crew kidnapping women and stealing things, so he ends up getting dragged back into it when his fiancée is among the captured. Her cousin Marasi also joins them as a student of law. They end up saving the day and solving it, but all of the women except for his fiancée are still out there in captivity. And Wax learns that his uncle that he thought was dead is behind it all.

 It's a really compelling story, and the magic system with using different metals to do different things (restore health, speed up time, act like a magnet and push/pull steel…) is quite cool. I really enjoyed that aspect, you can tell that the author put a lot of work into that part of the world building.

My main critique is that the romance between Wax and Marasi felt forced. Marasi plays the girl who is so flustered by this guy, flustered by everything really, but falls for him and he thinks he’s damaged goods so he turns her down. It's not even that it's necessarily bad, it's just sooooooo tired. And it's not that great of a trope! Not to mention that Wax killing his previous partner (who was female) feels like "kill the girl so that the man can have some character growth" and that I don't need. It's just you can tell that the author is male when you read this.

 The names are also a lot of fun while reading, there's Wax and Wayne obviously. But there's also the bad guy Max versus good guy Wax. That's all I noticed on first pass, I bet there's others I missed.

The whole idea of an alloy is a prevalent theme as well, that you can mix together two different things to create something new. It gets remarked on a lot in the dialogue in relation to character growth and in relation to the metals themselves since metal figures heavily in the magic system.

Other interesting thing to note is that there's sections from newspapers of the area that I’m sure have SOMETHING to do with the story but I can’t figure it out. They're just snippets of articles and some ads and I know there's something here but I can't figure it out!

 Ok so having thrown all these thoughts together, I adore the characters and the world and will keep reading. There's three more books in this series and I'm excited for them!