Fully review with plot summary can be found on my blog. This review contains spoilers.

Worldbuilding: 10/10. The Holy Dimension and its denizens were fantastic.

Plot: 4/10. Predicable and the pacing was totally out of whack.

Characters: 5/10. What happened to Vonvalt’s intelligence? And if you came for more Vonvalt the indomitable Justice and/or a budding romance with Helena, you won’t find it.

Should you read this?
Yes, because despite all the problems with the second book, I still have sufficient trust that Swan will deliver a spectacular ending to the series.
Yes, if you enjoy Bloodborne-esque cosmic horrors.
Yes, if you thought Vonvalt was too uptight and want to see him erupt with the fury of a thousand suns.
Yes, if you liked Helena Sedanka.
No, if you’re expecting more legal thrillers as in the first book.
No, if you’re expecting the murder mystery to be central to the story as in the first book.
No, if you enjoyed Vonvalt being hyper competent in the first book and expect more of the same.
No, if you like stories with a tight/fast pacing and/or don’t have the patience of wading through 40 chapters before any of the setup earns its payoff.

It is so hard to write this review. I have so much to say but so little enthusiasm to say them because my enthusiasm expired well before the book’s half-way point. But I feel obligated to explain how I went from fervently recommending the first book to everyone and their dog to barely being able to finish the second. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t have finished it if not for a skewed sense of duty that I ought to finish it to do this review justice. Hah, justice, the irony of it.

The Spectacular:

1. The Holy Dimension
If you liked Bloodborne, The Tyranny of Faith has got you covered in spades and then some because Helena actually steps foot into the afterlife. The descriptions of the Holy Dimension and its cosmic denizens are fantastic. They are every bit as terrifying and disturbingly wonderous as any lover of gothic horrors would want them to be.

The Truly Frustrating:

2. The Plot
In my review of the first book, I wrote that the predictable plot wasn’t a problem because it did well to showcase Vonvalt’s prowess, and that both the protagonists and the antagonists were acting rationally in the circumstances. The plot for the second book was just as predictable, but there was no showcase nor any rationality to salvage the predictability. More about the characters below.

3. The Pacing
The pacing is beyond questionable. Vonvalt’s ailment is introduced, quite literally, in the opening sentence, but we don’t learn anything meaningful about it in much of the first third, and it only becomes an issue well into the final third. With it being introduced and given so much attention so early, I had expected this to be a major plot point, but it was entirely inconsequential until the final third.

The first quarter of the book is spent investigating Claver, which is well expected following the events of the first book, but the side plot of the kidnapped prince wedges itself into the narrative, forcing the Claver investigation to a screeching halt. The side plot takes us on a long and unexciting detour where everyone but Vonvalt believes the prince to have been murdered, and finally concludes at the book’s midpoint with an equally unexciting revelation that the prince has, in fact, been murdered.

Except, the prince hasn’t been murdered, and the kidnapping and fabricated confession of the captured merchant was a plot devised by Claver and executed by Luitgard Rosa to rouse the emperor’s wrath toward Vonvalt and the Magistratum, thus causing Vonvalt to be disavowed and the Magistratum disbanded. This would’ve been an exciting plot twist if (1) it wasn’t revealed in the very last chapter, and (2) I hadn’t spent much of the second half of the book feeling bitterly cheated out of ten hours of my life being dragged through a side plot that was wholly lackluster, predictable, and unrevelatory at its apparent conclusion.

The problem isn’t that I hadn’t detected that there must be more to it. It’s abundantly clear from the merchant’s garbled confessions that his inconsistent memories about the kidnapping and murder were fabricated. (And by who else but Claver’s confederates? There are no others suspects.) No, the problem isn’t the foreshadowing. The problem is the complete lack of continuity and tension between the foreshadowing (setup) and the reveal (payoff). The second half of the book dropped the kidnapping side plot harder than Skrillex would drop his bass, and by the time the reveal confirmed my theories, I was well beyond the five stages of grieving my wasted time and attention, and I simply didn’t care anymore.

4. Sir Konrad Vonvalt
It is truly frustrating that Vonvalt and Helena never spare much thought on the most likely theories, and in the rare instances when they do, it’s merely a passing thought and nothing ever comes of it. Case in point: Vonvalt acknowledges that the prince’s untimely kidnapping might be connected with Claver, and that the merchant’s garbled confession is possibly caused by to some meddling of his mind, but he fails to contemplate the possibility that Claver, having possession of a great many tomes of arcane knowledge stolen from the Magistratum, might have meddled with the merchant’s mind. Sir Radomir and Bressinger attributes it to insanity, and Vonvalt simply buys their explanation of convenience without further thought. The Emperor’s Voice was thwarted a number of times in the first book–it is the weakest of the magicks, we know this–and yet Vonvalt relies on it so unquestioningly in this crucial and puzzling murder case despite there being so many strange and far-too-convenient quirks. It is truly uncharacteristic of him to be so irrational.

It’s hard to feel sympathetic for Vonvalt when it’s revealed that Luitgard Rosa had betrayed him. If I, an average reader, can connect the dots correctly, then surely Vonvalt, one of the smartest people in this vast empire, ought to have seen it much sooner and with much better clarity. And if he can’t, then he deserves to be betrayed.

An addendum: Besides the subpar detective work relating to the prince’s kidnapping, Vonvalt never spends any more time being a Justice. No more adjudicating the accused, no more glorious courtroom speeches, no more arbitrations of law. This was a deliberate choice because Swan is trying to veer away from Vonvalt the Justice to explore Vonvalt the Avenger, and finally, Vonvalt the Soldier. I respect the choice, but I don’t like it. I want more of Vonvalt of Justice because that’s what won me over, and what I expected more of.

It’s often said that one shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Writing is more an art than a science, but I think the principle stands. Within a series, it might be wise to not venture too far from what the readers loved, lest you lose them halfway through.

5. Luitgard Rosa
For a such a pivotal character with a major plot twist pinned on her, she is little more than a plot device with no personality. The only thing we learn about is her exceptional beauty and her tendency to grovel at Vonvalt.

Maybe that’s precisely Swan’s intention. We are, after all, seeing the world through Helena’s tinted lenses, and a jealous Helena can only see Rosa’s beauty and groveling driven into her own relationship with Vonvalt like a thorn. But I too am a writer, and I know a thing or two about balancing character perspective and the hardware requirements of executing a convincing plot twist.

The fact that Rosa was never truly a character means she’s unsympathetic. Given the far-too-convenient circumstances of how she came into Vonvalt’s employ, being unable to sympathize with her also means that she felt wholly untrustworthy. But Vonvalt trusts her–for inexplicable reasons because I’m not experiencing Rosa the same way that Vonvalt was experiencing her, and jaded Helena never tries to think about Rosa from Vonvalt’s perspective to avail me of that experience even hypothetically. And so, when I learned that Rosa was in fact an untrustworthy traitor, I felt so dead inside I didn’t even have the enthusiasm to facepalm.

6. The Inconsequential Death
Not for a moment did I believe that Vonvalt was going to die. There was no tension even as his health wanes, and the fact that Helena returned to Sudenberg to find that he had passed earlier that morning only made it more certain he would be resurrected. The only time that I felt any likelihood that he might actually die is when Vonvalt expressed utmost disinterest in returning to the mortal plane, and that’s because we had some setup in an earlier conversation with Justice August that spending time in the afterlife has the terrifying effect of making the (pre)life seem utterly distant, foreign, and unimportant.

It got my hopes up. For a moment I felt invested again to see Helena wields her limited arcane skills to pull Vonvalt back. I would’ve even settled for some intervention of luck at the blessing of the Trickster, but Helena simply faints. She wakes to find that Vonvalt is alive again, and the book spends all about two sentences to say that he was brought back by Justice August. Maybe the third book will offer a more detailed explanation, but I doubt I’d care by then.

The Same “Meh”:

7. Helena Sedanka
The first book had already proven her to be childish, prone to complaining, mildly cowardly, and incapable of solving problems in a logical and competent manner fit for the protege of an extraordinary Justice. So, I didn’t have high hopes for her going into the second book and was thus spared from disappointment that she was more of the same. But even so, I was utterly surprised that, when Bressinger and Sir Radomir were struggling against Claver, her brilliant idea was to open the Codex Elementa to a random page and incant the first thing she saw. She had no idea what the incantation was for, or how to incant it properly, because the extent of her arcane knowledge was a two-day crash course from Vonvalt for the purpose of reading an excerpt of the Grimoire Necromantia. Colour me (not) surprised that her ingenious idea torn a rift through the dimensions and demons came pouring out.

Helena’s deduction skills boil down to luck. Case in point: she finds the secret waterway into the Inner Sanctum because she was stumbled upon by an insane nun while snooping around, so as an excuse, she asks to be taken to the latrine, et voila, the waterway is beneath the latrine. Also case in point: the Inner Sanctum is filled with books and Helena thinks to herself that she couldn’t possibly find the Codex Elementa among this massive library. Two priests walk in and converses, they remove a book from a shelf out of nonchalance and replaces it, and that book happen to be the Codex Elementa.

But maybe it was a deliberate choice because after all, Helen had been marked by the Trickster. But then again, that would make all the coincidences benefitting her literal instances of deus ex machina.

8. The Perspective
I didn’t mind it in the first book, but honestly, the memoir format did a huge disfavour this time around. The plot was predictable enough, and without Vonvault’s magnetic charisma driving me forward, having future events spoiled by Older Helena completely slaughtered what was left of the story’s tension.

The Saving Grace:

9. Sir Konrad Vonvalt?
As much as he’s not the Vonvalt of the first book, I did enjoy the few moments that humanized him. It’s long overdue that he explained to Helena (and the readers) his sentiments toward her, and those (meagre three) moments were heartfelt and genuine. But two of those moments were letters that he had wrote, and I wish that he had interacted with Helena directly instead. If you’re holding out for a full-fledged romance between the two, you won’t find it.

10. The Side Cast
Bressinger and Sir Radomir had a lot more limelight. The book spent some time to explain Vonvalt’s violent avenging of Bressinger’s family that bonded the two men together, and the past trauma of Sir Radomir that made him the drunk that he is. These details made the two men so much more endearing.