The Secret Chapter by Genevieve CogmanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoy a heist, and I enjoy this series, but unfortunately I found the heist itself slightly underwhelming; it wasn't really the focus of the book, more of a means to an end, a necessary step that had to be gone through to get to the actual point. Which, sure, fits the rest of the series; they're always about wider questions, not just the action for its own sake, but it did diminish the heist's impact for me. (view spoiler)
I normally give this series my Well-Edited tag; most of them are flawless, or nearly so, but I spotted four glitches this time. The phrase "constantly in my quarter" should be "constantly in my corner"; "a dark-skinned man, his hair" is technically a dangling modifier, though a fairly subtle one; "leading a double-life" should not have a hyphen between the adjective and the noun it modifies (only between compound adjectives); and "You can't turn us into CENSOR" should be "You can't turn us in to CENSOR" (CENSOR being the dystopian supernatural police). Yes, that last one is an important distinction. I'm still giving it the tag, because compared with most books I read, four subtle errors like that are nothing.
As I've indicated, the heist takes place in a dystopian version of 21st-century Austria in which CENSOR engages in almost literal witch-hunts. Or, at least, vampire and werewolf hunts. That's more of a background inconvenience than a main plot feature, though. It also starts and ends on a private Caribbean island where a powerful, manipulative fae rules, and it gives us more tantalizing background on the real origins of the dragons, which are different from their publicly proclaimed legend. I think I've remarked before that this series has the feel of being inspired by Zelazny's Amber series, in that the dragons represent the pole of order (like Amber itself) and the fae the pole of chaos (like the Courts of Chaos), and there's a multiverse of alternate worlds with different balances of those two forces. The Library, which strives to keep the balance so that humans retain some degree of freedom, doesn't have an analog in the Amberverse, though, and it's a great addition to the worldbuilding.
I enjoy the way that, throughout the series, the protagonist Irene learns more and more about how things actually work behind the scenes, and is more and more stretched to act in line with her personal ethics and preserve what's important to her. We get to know her better, too; in this book, we meet her parents at last.
I also, of course, enjoy Irene's competent and sensible approach to what is often looming disaster at an insane scale. That element is certainly present here, and I rate this book as solid, well-written and entertaining, even though, for me, more could have been made of the heist.
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