** spoiler alert ** 
 Too Like the Lightning is a complex and intriguing book. I loved the narrator's voice, the inconsistent and insistently misleading pronoun usage. I never felt that the mystery was contrived, it felt that Mycroft was trying to tell me the story in the way he thought best. The world-building was incredible, and the way Palmer slowly introduces us to concepts and characters worked well for me. I'm also always on board for a story with a more positive outlook on the future, or at least not a blatantly dystopian one. 
 Ultimately I felt a bit let down by the conclusion. The payoff at the end of the book was really only solving a mystery that was introduced fifty pages earlier. The bigger events, political, personal and theological, seem to be picking up right where they left off in Seven Surrenders. 
 I really enjoyed this book, and I've already started on Seven Surrenders.