Disquiet Gods

Hadrian Marlowe has spent two centuries in exile. He struck the Emperor and walked away from his duties, and in his absence a plague has spread across the galaxy while the Cielcin invasion presses humanity toward collapse.

Then HAPSIS, the Emperor's first-contact intelligence agency, locates one of the Watchers, the enormous beings the Pale Cielcin worship. Hadrian is called back from exile with the promise of a way home, and the job he is handed sounds impossible: kill a god.

His daughter Cassandra and his companion Neema travel with him through the Sollan Empire. Their route crosses a series of worlds, starting on the volcanic planet Jadd, and the book is built as a run of separate arcs rather than one continuous line.

This is the sixth Sun Eater novel and the second to last before the finale, picking up about two hundred years after Ashes of Man. It mixes space opera with long political and philosophical interludes and a streak of cosmic horror. The middle moves slowly, the last stretch moves fast, and it is a heavy volume that expects readers to know the earlier books.