Heartless

Premise
I had this and the last volume for the series lying on my bookshelf for years. I read the previous volume "Blameless" in 2016 and it is not optimal to read the story again after so many years, because I lose somehow interest and connection to the story. Unfortunately on the internet, I could not find any recaps, but on the other side, I read the mangas. That makes it as if I have read the first three books one and a half times. And I did not lose the connections to the original characters of Alexia, Conall, Lord Akeldama, and so on. I thought of writing this premise because it will highly impact my review.

Plot
I found the plot pretty uninteresting, besides a few revelations.

Characters
Regarding a couple of characters, Prof. Lyall and Ivy, we assisted a big change that looked out of character to me. I love dynamic characters: characters that change sides, that grow, that are well-developed. However, to write a well-round evolution, you need a larger amount of pages, to show the change to readers. I am not sure if these changes were hinted at in the previous books already and I don't remember them or if they were meant to be unexpected.

Conclusion
Overall, I found it a nice read. I enjoyed going back to my beloved and funny characters, but I found myself not very involved in the story and found those revelations not quite fitting.

With book four, we've reached the inevitable point in a book series where the new has worn off. The world has been established, I can largely predict the direction a plot is going to take and how the key players will handle it. The author now has certain things they have to do each book in order to keep their fans happy and generally I'm starting to see behind the curtain so to speak.

Basically Gail Carriger is serving up more of what I enjoyed in the previous books. But for me that is part of the problem. It's more of the same. And in the absence of anything new and shiny something else is needed to keep my attention.

Usually that something would be the characters. By book four I should be sufficiently invested in them that I want to follow them regardless of how familiar certain scenes may feel. Unfortunately in this case we're dealing with characters that really never got developed in the first place.

Well with the exception of Alexia herself, she is a reasonably rounded individual (no that wasn't a reference to her pregnancy in this story). But her relationships with everyone else are so shallow and the other characters could be summed up in a couple of sentences so there's really no sense of tension here at all.

It doesn't help either that the books are now clearly being written in a serial format with story elements bleeding in from previous books and onto the next. Of course this should make me more inclined to read the next book. But since the plot was so predictable in this book and the characters have failed to really interest me, it instead tells me to jump off now before things devolve into soap-opera territory.

So, yeah, more of the same if that's what you like. I've read this story enough times now though.