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

Worldbuilding: 6.5/10. The worldbuilding is still phenomenal. The execution, not so much.

Plot: 2/10. By far the most predictable of the trilogy. It’s not a bad plot, but the predictability of it really detracts from any sense of tension.

Characters: 7/10. I have a lot of mixed things to say about Helena.

Should you read this?
Yes, if your experience with the first two books is positive. (Even if it’s neutral, you might as well. It’s a good book and you’ve come so far. Just temper your expectations because the plot is truly predictable.)
Yes, if you enjoy large-scale battles.
Yes, if you’re want more of the Holy Dimension and its eldritch denizens, this time in blood-curdling and excruciating detail.
Yes, if you enjoyed Helena Sedanka and/or wanted more development for her.
No, if you didn’t enjoy–specifically–the second book.
No, if you’re expecting more of Vonvalt doing Justice things.
No, if the primary reason you enjoyed any of the first two books is the legal thriller and/or the murder mysteries aspects.
No, if extremely predictable plot is a major deal breaker.

For the lack of a better world, the book was very “mid”. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s also very few spectacular things. So instead of my usual categories, I’ll just address everything together.

1. The Plot
So much happened, but also so little. You can pretty much boil the whole thing down to three parts: The retinue goes north, gathers up an army without consequential difficulties. The retinue goes south, gathers up an army without consequential difficulties. The retinue returns to the capital in time to put together an army to defend against the enemy siege. When the enemy overwhelms the defending army, the tardy southern army shows up to save the day at the last moment. The structure is so blatant from the get-go, it never deviates from its course. Hardly anything unexpected transpires, and in the rare case that we do go off the course for a bit, there’s very little impact and we veer back on course very quickly.

The characters travel such a vast distance, see so many different lands and people and cultures, but none of it felt consequential. Sure, Vonvalt has his arguments with Lady Frost, and he had to hustle to earn the Wolfmen’s trust, but at no point did I ever feel that he could fail either of his quests. It’s as if his quests had an impenetrable suit of plot armour. And since there’s no perceived possibility of failure, there are no real stakes, and thus no sense of tension. As a result, most of the plot events felt like they were necessary gestures for the sole purpose of getting the characters to the next location, so that they could make the next set of necessary gestures to get to the next location, and so forth.

In my review of Justice, I said the plot was predictable, but that I didn’t mind it because the predictability came from the enemies acting rationally, and that served to showcase Vonvalt’s procedural prowess because he’s the ultimate focus of the book. In my review of Tyranny, I said the plot was even more predictable, but there’s no showcase of rationality to salvage that predictability. The issue with Tyranny is exacerbated in Trials. It’s the most predictable for all three, and there is truly nothing else to focus on to counterbalance that predictability that takes away all sense of tension.

2. Helena Sedanka
My opinion about Helena is hard to change. I didn’t like her very much in the first two books for reasons previously stated, so I didn’t expect to like her very much here, and I didn’t. But if I put aside my subjective prejudices and assess her objectively, Helena actually saw a lot of character development in Trials. We know that her faith in Vonvalt has been deteriorating ever since the end of Justice. In Tyranny, she more or less internalizes her frustrations toward him, but in Trials, all of that comes out. From the midpoint onwards, she pushes back against him quite vocally and starts actively taking part in events in her own right, on her own volition, away from Vonvalt and sometimes without giving notice to him or obtaining his prior approval.

She’s a legitimately active character in Trials, and I can respect that. But I still don’t like her, and that’s a personal preference. She takes up the moral high ground and insists on dying on that hill notwithstanding Vonvalt’s repeated attempts to explain to her that the world is literally ending and everything he’s doing–murder, torture, and what Helena considers to be a general moral callousness–is everything that must be done by somebody because shit is hitting the fan and the entire moral plane is going down the shitter, very rapidly.

I don’t know. I just can’t. Insisting that Vonvalt is a moral degenerate for being less than perfectly ethical when there are literally no time nor choice seems supremely juvenile. Helena says she understands that the situation forces his hands, but I don’t believe she truly understood anything because she springs back to her moral high ground almost immediately, always.

Most laughably, the only time she genuinely acknowledges from the bottom of her heart that Vonvalt is fundamentally a good man and he did what was necessary to save the world, was after the world was saved. If this is hypocritical, I don’t know what is. Vonvalt had it hard during the leadup–and she knew this–but never once did she truly consider it from his perspective, and never once did she decide to get off her moral high-horse to be a supportive companion.

I genuinely don’t know what Vonvalt sees in her. She’s always quite selfish and childish. Her character development, in my entirely subjective and charged opinion, is to go from someone who always internalized her personal opinions in order to appease a man she respected, to someone who decided to act unilaterally on her personal opinions without regard of the approval of the man whom she no longer respected. It’s the standard independence trope. She realizes that her admiration of Vonvalt is a shackle, and she breaks free of it. I can respect that independence, especially when it’s a female character against a male, but I respect it a lot less when there are a lot of pressing problems to solve on an apocalyptical scale. In a nutshell, Helena isn’t for me because I don’t think she’s acting perfectly rationally, because her priorities don’t match up with what mine would be if I were in her situation.

3. Sir Konrad Vonvalt
You don’t get a whole lot of Vonvalt in Trials because Helena is finding her sense of self for the first time. She spends a lot of time doing things away from Vonvalt, and because she’s actively trying to divorce herself from him and his opinion of her, she doesn’t turn her mind to him much either, except when she wants to reprimand his morally questionable actions. But if I were to make an approximation, Vonvalt in Trials is more like the version of him in Tyranny than in Justice.

4. Resi August
I was very critical about fridging August in my review of Justice. I didn’t address her in my review of Tyranny because she was very clearly still alive (just in a different capacity), so I wanted to wait and see what Swan does with this character. Turns out, not much. August serves much the same purpose in Trials as she did in Tyranny–being a plot device that avails Helena to the skills, knowledge, and Magical McGuffin she needs to advance the plot. She is very much Helena’s deus ex machina and not so much a character in her own right. To put into perspective, there’s more depth to Severina von Osterlen than Resi August, which is really unfortunate.

5. The Worldbuilding
The worldbuilding is still the strongest aspect. We finally get to see the Holy Dimensions in its full glory. Helena travels there a number of times, and each time there’s something new that she discovers. But the Holy Dimensions is still full of mysteries. I loved the Bloodbornesque aesthetics, but I truly did not enjoy how those mysteries were explained. You’d think that the book dripfeeds the intrigues and conflicts between the forces of Nema/Savare and that of Kasivar by having Helena witness and experience them bit by bit during her many trips to the Holy Dimensions, but no, you get pretty much all of the details of the worldbuilding told to you in the form of a ten-minute-long Q&A session between Aegraxes and Helena. It was a classic example of exposition info dump.

6. The Side Cast
Sir Radomir and Margrave von Osterlen are still great. They each got a fair bit of screentime, and we get to see each of them bond with Helena in their own ways, and that was nice.

Senator Jansen was a bit of a miss for me. The intrigue involving his uncertain loyalty didn’t feel very intriguing to me because I never for once doubted that he was a traitor, so I felt that the back-and-forth about whether he is or isn’t a traitor was superficial and unnecessarily time-consuming.