Now, the once-idealistic heir apparent has become the cruel Emperor Tyrus, wielding his authority with an iron fist, capable of destroying planets with a single word, controlling all technology with a simple thought. He has bent the Grandiloquy to their knees, and none has the power to stand against him.
But there is a muttering among the Excess. They say that Nemesis is not truly gone. They whisper of her shadow spotted in distant star systems. They say that Nemesis lives. That she will rise, and rally the people to topple the man who was once her truest love—and is now her fiercest enemy.
I loved The Diabolic. I thought it was really clever, well thought out. Great world building. The Empress was, maybe, half a step down; still excellent, but not as excellent. Still, I had high hopes for The Nemesis, to see where all the story threads would lead.
Into a tangled mess, as far as I can tell. For one thing, it's nearly three years since I read the last one. There's no recap, there's no list of players. Even for readers with a better memory than I have, it can't be easy to keep track after so long. But, I'm reading an ARC and there may be differences in the final book.
The timeline is all over the place. We're mostly set a couple of years after the ending of the last book, as far as I can tell, but every so often Nemesis will have a completely unannounced flashback to some other time period to cover things that happened inbetween the books. I couldn't keep these in any kind of order.
This one's more personal; there's so much politics and double crossing and triple crossing and recrossing, I couldn't keep track of who was on what side for what reason and how long they'd been there. In particular, Nemesis herself danced back and forth between 'I must kill him' and 'I can't kill him' so many times she must have had whiplash by the end.
Other readers might enjoy this, and if you can read them as a series instead of spread out over five years they might be better. It's not for me I'm afraid.
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