Traitors Gate by Kate Elliott

Captain Anji and his Qin take the fight for the Hundreds to the false Guardians and their minions.   Whether the dauntless Captain is truly a mommy's boy is discovered.  Treachery on all fronts leads to the title of the book.

The main characters find their lives primarily wrapped up in this book.   The author definitely leaves the fate of the Hundreds open to a sequel.   The battle of good and evil is marked with various shades of gray.   Is order and peace a quantified good or can order and peace be characterized as benevolent dictatorship? 

The open question of the other races in the Hundreds is left as a question.  The potential for a series on each sub-group would be a welcome series.  Whether Wildlings, Mers or Firelings there lies a wealth of material for future stories.  

The author wrapped up the trilogy but leaves the reader famished for more.   I hope the Hundreds will appear again as a topic tackled by Elliott.   She creates believable characters and postulates interesting social conventions.  They may be historically based or purely subjective but they are believable.   If you question the believability, consider for a moment how wildly speculative it would have been twenty years ago to have marijuana legalized in some states.   Sociological theories run amuck in this series.

If you chose to look no further than the action and the adventure you will still be satisfied and possibly sated but if you want to ponder the implications of women's rights, sequesterization, homosexuality, might making right, legal prostitution, this series will  provide fodder for in depth introspection.

I highly recommend the book. 

web site: http://www.kateelliott.com/

  

 This book may have been received free of charge from a publisher or a publicist. That will NEVER have a bearing on my recommendations.