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Cinnabar Shadows is Lynn Abbey's second Dark Sun novel and the entry where the series finds the political and personal weight that the first book had been setting up. The young Pavek of The Brazen Gambit has grown into a more complicated figure. The political tensions in Urik have shifted. The sorcerer-king Hamanu is starting to be more interesting than the previous book's framing allowed.
Abbey is good at the long shared-world arc that the Thieves' World experience prepared her for. The character development across the two books is honest. The closing chapters set up The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking with the kind of intentionality that the form does not always have.
Four stars. Read after The Brazen Gambit and before the trilogy closer.
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