This is book 8 of the "Safehold" series.

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

Still not quite the latest Safehold book.

This one seemed to have nothing at all happening in it. I almost didn't finish it, in fact, a couple of times.

And rumors I heard not in the book itself (but reading about it online) suggest that this series is never going to get to the question of what to do about the aliens that destroyed Earth. In one way that makes sense, this single planet can't possibly develop far enough to take them on. But in another way it's an utterly unsatisfactory story. If that happens, I will feel I've wasted about 2/3 of the time I've spent on this series (some of the ideas about applying advanced knowledge to low-tech manufacturing and warfere were interesting).