An unwanted heir inherits. He is decent about it. Decency turns out to be the hardest thing available in the room, and the book is four hundred pages of watching it cost him.

There is a version of this novel that is a revenge story, and the fact that it refuses to be one is the reason I finished it in six days. Nobody gets what they deserve. People get what the protocol allows, and the protagonist's slow discovery that he can bend the protocol without breaking it is more satisfying than any duel I have read this year.

The names

I have to address this. The naming conventions are dense, systematic, and initially a wall — honorifics that shift with formality, family prefixes, place-derived suffixes. There is a glossary and you will use it. I bounced off page forty on my first attempt for exactly this reason.

It is worth pushing through, and here is the trick: stop trying to hold the system and just let the names be sounds for a hundred pages. The grammar arrives on its own. The density is doing real work — the whole novel is about a man drowning in a court's rules, and putting the reader briefly in the same water is not an accident.

A political novel in which the radical act is being kind on purpose, in public, where it can be used against you.— The Editor

Where it thins

The plot, such as it is, resolves a little easily. An investigation concludes; the people who wished the protagonist ill are dealt with more neatly than the preceding three hundred pages had led me to expect. I did not mind much, but I noticed.