Huge thank you to NetGalley and Orbit for the ARC! I LOVED this book and I am so excited for everyone to read this. I'm rating this 4.5 stars, rounded up. My two favorite reads so far this year have been The Spear Cuts Through Water and These Burning Stars. Take the incredible world-building of The Spear Cuts Through Water (and even elements of the structure that dips into various POVs) and combine it with the morally gray, ambitiously motivated characters of These Burning Stars, and you’ll get the fat, sexy book baby that is The Mercy Makers. The story follows Iriset, daughter of a crime boss and genius designer creating magical disguises and other illegal inventions. When her father is captured and sentenced to death, Iriset seizes an opportunity to get in close with the ruling family and attempt to manipulate them to save her father. But this is just the beginning: the arrival of a foreign princess betrothed to the emperor sets off a chain of events that pull Iriset deeper and deeper into a political world that she might want to destroy entirely. This is one of those novels that is so surprising in its twists and turns that you have to tread carefully in reviewing it because there is so much that could be spoiled. The world-building is beautifully done, and you really just have to throw yourself into it and learn the magic as you read; explaining my favorite parts here would, in my opinion, be as much a spoiler as a plot point. But I love that this doesn’t just follow the cookie cutter “evil empire vs scrappy rebellion” scheme that has become so repetitive in a lot of fantasy novels. Iriset isn’t leading a revolution: she’s up close and personal with the makers of empire themselves, and while it’s always easy to identify and criticize what people do wrong, it’s much less simple to formulate what they should all be doing instead. The Mercy Makers also really excelled in its character development. None of these characters are good people, but there is so much nuance in both their actions and the world around them that you find them sympathetic and understandable even while they are behaving atrociously. I will admit, this is absolutely the smuttiest fantasy book I’ve ever read, and that’s where I’m docking half a star. I don’t like gratuitous sex scenes in books: erotica and steamy romances exist for that. It’s fine for it to be sexy and have sex scenes — that’s part of the political intrigue, and Iriset’s behavior during sex does help define her — but several pages of graphic intercourse doesn’t need to be interrupting the plot. —— Is it queer? Emphatically, YES. Iriset is blatantly bisexual, and there are a number of interesting takes on gender and gender roles as well (for example, the two ruling positions are decided by the order of birth of royal children, so even though one of them has the word “Mistress” in the title, that position can be and has been held by men). There is also a character with unique in-world pronouns, which I love to see. Is it diverse? Yes, there are various racial and ethnic divides between the people. The ruling party, which contains a strain of religiously-motivated racial superiority, is not white. However, neither are the people they have conquered, and these are complex and fully developed characters. Complicated anti-hero/sympathetic villain roles should not be reserved for white people, and I like that we have other ethnicities in power here. How long did it take? I spent around 15 hours reading this, though I was very definitely reading on the slow side (even for me!) for this one.

All I can say for now is that I hope this book gets the praise it deserves. I'll be posting my full review closer to the publication date.