The final book of the Queen's Thief series!! This one had a lot to live up to by following Thick as Thieves, which I (as predicted by everyone I know who had already read it) absolutely loved. Luckily, Return of the Thief managed to be a completely different kind of book that I ALSO adored.
I knew things were going to go well when the narrator of RotT was revealed to be a character who, when mentioned in a fairly off-hand way at the end of TaT, I immediately wanted to know more about. Pheris, the youngest attendant to the High King, is an ideal outsider voice to tell the final chapter of the series, which requires the sort of historian overview narrative that I associate with Guy Gavriel Kay books, in particular his books based on similar conflicts in settings that are clearly directly inspired by the same general regions. Pheris being the physically disabled son of one of the main opposing barons of Attolia also adds to that ideal dynamic, where he's close enough to power to understand it, but isn't considered a player himself.
The war that has been steadily building since the first book finally explodes, and all of the various threads in play weave together in a way that's less dependent on the narrator being unreliable and more in that satisfying way of final puzzle pieces finally coming together. We also finally got canon gays, and I will say no more on that topic, other than it is all extremely nice.
All in all, a lovely end to a series I really, really enjoyed getting to experience over the past couple of months.
Grade: A
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