The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

paperback, 656 pages

Published May 10, 2021 by Tor Books.

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (7 reviews)

The hunt is over. After fifteen years of lies and sacrifice, Baru Cormorant has the power to destroy the Imperial Republic of Falcrest that she pretends to serve. The secret society called the Cancrioth is real, and Baru is among them.

But the Cancrioth's weapon cannot distinguish the guilty from the innocent. If it escapes quarantine, the ancient hemorrhagic plague called the Kettling will kill hundreds of millions...not just in Falcrest, but all across the world. History will end in a black bloodstain.

Is that justice? Is this really what Tain Hu hoped for when she sacrificed herself?

Baru's enemies close in from all sides. Baru's own mind teeters on the edge of madness or shattering revelation. Now she must choose between genocidal revenge and a far more difficult path—a conspiracy of judges, kings, spies and immortals, puppeteering the world's riches and two great wars in a gambit for the …

3 editions

Not sure I need a 4th book

4 stars

While by no means perfect, this wrapped up most of the plot lines I care about. The "spoiler" at the end honestly sounds like the beginning of a thread that would take more than a single book to explore so I'm doubtful that a fourth book would really be the end of the series. Not that I'd be against another trilogy but it would have to have a very different feel to the series if it was centered around the same characters given their wildly different dispositions between the beginning of the series and where they end up at the finale of Tyrant.

Review of 'The Tyrant Baru Cormorant' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I was really happy to finally read this book, considering Monster left Baru, Tau, Aminata and plenty other characters in really fragile places. This picks up right where Monster ended, and continues to build upon both Traitor and Monster's thematic and narrative throughlines in a very satisfying way, and it even closes a surprising number of them by the end, leaving plenty of blank spaces for book 4, which I find very exciting!

Surprisingly, I feel like this book retroactively makes Monster more enjoyable for me; I thought Monster felt a bit meandering and aimless at times, no doubt a reflection of Baru's own state of mind(s?) during most of that book (which somewhat justifies the criticism, but didn't make it any easier to wade through at the time), but Tyrant does a lot of work to re-contextualize events in Monster in clever ways that make me excited about potentially …