Grave Empire (The Great Silence, #1) by Richard Swan

I feel like Swan spends more time on the luscious maps at the front of his books and in whiteboarding all of the politics and descriptions of each minute province than he does on the story, and I am okay with that. It’s some in-depth, hard world-building and it really makes the various races and polities, human and otherwise, stick in the brain while reading. And the plot itself is pretty interesting, too, don’t get me wrong. This is the first book in a sequel series to his prior Empire of the Wolf trilogy, set a few hundred years later...