This is book 7 of the "Safehold" series.

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

Tor promotional copy that got passed along to me.

For me, there's a very severe case of mid-series blues going on in this series at this point. This book is almost completely interchangeable with the previous book.

And the mounting evil of the established church just wears on me. Possibly because I tend to take that as a given; religion is evil. And he hasn't quite stooped to killing puppies to make the point, but pretty close, when the point has been well-established for some time.

Maybe part of it is that I foresee a hugely long future—this series can't be considered over until the aliens who destroyed Earth (about 1000 years ago now) are extinct, and this one little planet of humans is very far from ready to take them on.

It'd be a heck of a joke on the readers if it turned out they'd gone extinct on their own 600 years ago, wouldn't it? Or maybe that Earth had won rather than been destroyed in the final onslaught, but had had no record of the location of Safehold (security precaution) and took 1000 years to bump into them again? I'm sure I'd just laugh and laugh if something like that happened.