Through Fiery Trials: A Novel in the Safehold Series

A pretty disappointing departure from the action of previous books in the series. Nothing interesting happens, yet it was the most expensive book so far. I'm not holding out much hope for another one, given most of Weber's recent books appear to be in conjunction with other authors. Fair play I suppose, given almost 60 years of writing! My head-canon is the ending is the second part of the N plan, and what happens next is left as an exercise in imagination for the reader.

As much as I like the original character development, the last several books could have been condensed to about 75 pages each and covered all the important aspects of the book. In this case we have many points of view and do spend a lot of time with the former enemies and their reconstruction effort. Unfortunately, most of the book is meetings and conversations. Very little action at all. We end up with the cliff hanger that makes us want the next book way too late. Even though a lot of time passed, we did not get much movement in the timeline. We did get introduced to what is probably the next generation of main characters. I guess we'll have to wait another couple of years...

while the most wordy it has moments of action spaced a bit far from each other the general premise of this book seems to be a lead up to book 11.... which isn't out yet but soon hopefully we will get to see some more action now that the heros and villains alike have gotten some time to develop and we have some insight into their way of thinking and their motivations