The Traitor Baru Cormorant

Executive Summary: A decent book that felt slow in places, particularly the last quarter or so, resulting in my rounding a 3.5 star rating down.Audio book: Christine Marshall was a decent narrator. She has a good clear reading voice and speaks at a good volume. I didn't find her particularly memorable one way or another. I'd consider the audiobook a fine option if you want to go that route, but nothing special.Full ReviewI knew nothing about this book or the author prior to this coming up for a vote in Sword & Laser. It sounded the best of the choices.Prior to reading it, most of what I heard was that it was incredibly bleak. Maybe I've read too much grimdark that I've grown too indifferent, but I didn't find this all that bad. It's certainly a darker and more serious book than some fantasy, but not nearly as dark as more popular series like Song of Ice and Fire or Malazan Book of the Fallen.The difference may be that I cared less for Baru Cormorant than I do for some of the characters in both of those series. When bad things happened, I wasn't all that upset. And bad things don't happen the whole time, though it may feel that way to some.The main point of interest to me was how the Empire of Masks used clever finance, and not military might to conquer. This reminds me a bit of Dagger and Coin by [a:Daniel Abraham 134 Daniel Abraham https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1207149629p2/134.jpg]. However if I had to recommend one “Fantasy Economic” series, it would definitely be Dagger & Coin over this one.That brings me to my next point. This is another one of those books that I think isn't being well advertised as the start of a series. I shouldn't be surprised as everything is a series these days. Things do come to a decent conclusion, but it's obvious that things are setup for a longer series fairly early on in the series.This could be that this is the author's first published novel (at least I believe it is), and sequels are contingent on how well this one does. However I think it should be made clear to the potential reader that they are committing to “yet another series”, and ideally how long. Standard trilogy? Something longer? One of the reasons I voted for this book over the others, is they were all part of series, and I didn't realize this was as well.I thought the writing was pretty good, especially for a first time author. I don't recall big info dumps or painful dialogue.There were definitely parts of this book I enjoyed, but it was uneven. Overall, I thought the world building of the Masked Empire was more interesting than the plot or the characters themselves. I enjoyed learning about the Mask Empire early on in the book, but by the end I found my mind wandering in places and simply eager to just finish the book. The weaker ending caused me to round down my rating instead of up. At this point I'm not sure I'll continue on with the next book in the series, your mileage may vary though.