Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is comfort food of the highest caliber. There's nothing like rivers of blood (most of it Toby's) and the deaths of kings to get make me feel like I'm home again.

I mean, ostensibly, we ought to be having this *mostly* fae MC start celebrating her near-marriage with Tybalt, the King of Cats or just eating lots of pizza with her underage wards, but NOOOOOO of course things aren't that easy.

Now that a cure is available for Elf-Shot, the magic that can put any Fae to sleep for a hundred years or kill any halfblood with a scratch, of course there's a lot of political maneuverings on both sides, perhaps turning the use of it away from careful uses of punishment for major crimes and on to a wholesale indiscriminate use during war because the pure bloods can always get woken up again. (Ignoring the fact that everyone else would be dead. Not that most pure bloods care.)

Good arguments both ways, including getting all the wrongfully Elf-Shot Fae woken up and perhaps just setting laws that limit the use of Elf-Shot or removing it from the arsenals altogether.

See a mirror to our world going on here? Gun laws and the prison system? lol

But of course nothing is rational or easy when the law of the land is based on irrational decisions by High Monarchs, and the political scene is ready to unravel any minute, seeing opportunities to get away with murder, and of course, that's exactly what happens.

Mystery, intrigue... and tragedy. No spoilers. I was pretty much blubbering by the time so many of Toby's.... well... she also lost a ton of blood. It's a difficult time.

And what a great novel. :) Total comfort food. Popcorn fiction. :) Of course now I can't wait for the next.

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