Wrath of Empire

Executive Summary: Another excellent book by Mr. McClellan. The first trilogy was good, but this one is so much better so far.Audiobook: Christian Rodska does another excellent job with this book. He does a variety of voices and accents that really give the audio version that extra something that makes this series a must listen for me.Full ReviewWhen I reviewed [b:Sins of Empire 28811016 Sins of Empire (Gods of Blood and Powder, #1) Brian McClellan https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472056794s/28811016.jpg 49026464] last year, I called it Brian McClellan's best book to date. If this book isn't better than that one, it's a very close tie. We're talking too close to call. Either way it was another easy 5 star rating for me.Much like the last book it's split up into three subplots following Vlora, Ben and Mikael. There were times when I was annoyed to leave one story for another, but then I got sucked into that subplot and I was just as annoyed at leaving that story as well.If had to choose however, I'd probably give the slight edge to Mikael. I'm a sucker for the spy stories. Ben is a very close second though, in particular because I think he's had the most interesting character development of the series thus far. Vlora's story was also quite good, just slightly behind the other two.I don't feel like this book suffers at all from middle book syndrome either. I'm very eager to get my hands on the third book, but I felt like he got each story to a good stopping point while setting things up nicely for the ending.There were some more fantastic world building, a few really great surprises, plenty of actions and a bunch of interesting characters that got me finding reasons to keep listening just a little bit longer each day.I'm hard-pressed to recommend this series if you haven't read his original Powder Mage trilogy first, but I think it is written in such a way that you could. You'd miss out on a lot of backstory and detail that way.Either way I'll continue to recommend Brian McClellan while eagerly awaiting the final book of this series to see if he can pull off a 5-star conclusion. Given the last two books, I suspect that he will.