I wish I'd taken longer to read this book. It does an amazing job at making me care about very unlikable people. It does a great job of being intriguing without exagerated action sequences (even though action was there). It's dark but it doesn't wallow in the gruesomeness going on. (It reminded me a bit of [b:The Collector|243705|The Collector|John Fowles|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1394828024s/243705.jpg|1816452].) It worked well as a standalone and the hook for reading the following books is in the authors afterword where he talks about the questions about the world of this book that are not yet answered but are presumably answered in the following books.