Dance of Shadows by Gourav Mohanty Pub Date 02/25/2025

Dance of Shadows essentially picks up right where Sons of Darkness ended, and it goes a hundred miles a minute from there. It is relentless in not just action but atrocities, and when I say I genuinely tried to figure out how I could cover my eyes and still read something, I mean that with every fiber of my being. And I can promise you in what thirty-ish years of a reading a scene has never been so devastating, so violent, so just fucking messed up that I instinctively attempted to cover my eyes. And yet through all of the blood, gore, and political machinations it still ended up laughing through much of it. 

This all means that it was absolutely amazing. I'm not sure how many books this is going to end up being but this was almost the perfect middle book if it's going to be a trilogy. Mohanty doesn't get bogged down in anything unnecessary here and while this is absolutely brutal that's absolutely the point. He could have drug this out so much longer and genuinely never even gained or completely lost the momentum that the violence of this book builds, there is something very wrong happening in this world and this volume drove home a desperate need to see that violence ended. Which is the perfect way to ensure that humans want to read book three!

Just a heads up I think given everything I've said here this is painfully violent and the scene that I referenced earlier will be especially difficult for women, mothers especially to read, so there's your trigger warning. This is definitely not a series for the faint of heart. 

Overall, I highly recommend this one, especially if you read book one. It certainly ends many threads and then throws us right back into the fire. 

As always thanks to NetGalley and Head Of Zeus/Bloomsbury USA for the eArc!

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