"Shadows of Self" by Brandon Sanderson

This book is the sequel to The Alloy of Law and similarly I did get it for free off of Tor.com. However, this one feels very different, I think the author wrote the two pretty far apart temporally. And I suspect that he changed his mind with where he wanted the series to go. One big change is that the narration is slightly different, instead of full chapters from a characters POV we get sections from multiple depending on what’s happening (one isn’t necessarily better but I think indicates a different approach to this book).

The book starts after the previous one: Wax is a constable, Wayne is tagging around with him, and Marasi has gone into law as well (she’s an assistant at the moment). Then there’s been a mysterious mass murder and Wax is on the case when he receives communication (a full conversation really) from Harmony, this universe’s god. (This is where things start to get weird.) It turns out that one of Harmony’s servants has gone rogue and is doing the killing. Their name is Bleeder and they want to free the world from Harmony’s dictatorship. (There’s a LOT about their religion and things like that in this book, I wasn’t able to follow all of it but you get the general idea that they’re up against a very powerful supernatural being.) It turns out that Bleeder was the governor all along and they end up having the constables take charge instead and use the mob mentality of the city (stirred up by Bleeder) to root out corruption. Meanwhile Wax is facing down Bleeder and finds out that Bleeder used to be his old lover Lessie out in the Roughs. Wax thought he killed Lessie and then ends up killing Bleeder. Again.

I honestly liked the original basis of a fantasy mystery book more so than the mystical gods stuff, so take all of this with a grain of salt. It is a cool way though to explore free will, for a lot of the book Wax is dealing with how Harmony tells him to do things, or puts him in situations, just to fulfill a plan of his. This connects to Bleeder who wants to end this and give people full autonomy/chaos really, but that comes with a lot of murder and stuff.

I don’t know, we’ll see where this goes. I didn’t love the turn that this took, having the god stuff was pretty heavy handed for what the author wanted to talk about. But I do have the next one so I might as well read it.