Another great entry in the Sun Eater. If you've made it this far into the series, you'll like this one, though it is quite a bit different than the previous novels.

Kingdoms of Death is incredibly dark. Previous novels didn't shy away from violence and death by any means, but they always had a core of hope, a feeling that the good guys would win the day and that Hadrian would snatch victory from nowhere. In fact, it was a criticism of mine that Hadrian was a little too overpowered. Not so in Kingdoms of Death. Here, Hadrian is beaten down and broken, and unlike in previous novels, the majority of it is spent alone. It was a nice change of pace from the crew and battle dynamics that were just edging up on getting stale.

This novel is incredibly bleak, and there's very little hope all the way up until the last 10% of the book. It's almost a bit too much; there were sections I think could've been shortened without losing any of their impact, especially in a novel already so long.

The end of the novel is something of a reset for Hadrian, and feels like a dividing line between the rising action of the series and its climax and downswing.