The Winner's Crime

The follow-up to The Winner's Curse, and a book about the cost of a lie you cannot afford to explain.

Kestrel's engagement to the crown prince is the event of the season, and to her it is a cage she built herself. She agreed to the marriage for one reason: in exchange, Arin went free. She aches to tell him so, and she cannot — because the emperor's price for Arin's life is her silence, and one honest sentence would spend it.

So she stays. She smiles at the right people, she plays the courtier, and she turns out to be very good at deception. Working as a spy inside the palace, passing what she learns to people who would be executed for hearing it, Kestrel edges closer to a secret large enough to break the empire — and closer to the moment she is caught.

Marie Rutkoski's middle volume is almost entirely a book of rooms and conversations: a political thriller about two people who love each other, cannot say so, and keep making choices the other reads as betrayal. It ends badly, and deliberately so.