An engaging, action packed tale that has a very steampunk feel about it while also being somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hobb's stories. The Waking Fire introduces a new world that has dragons, but instead of magic we get the Blood Blessed, a percentage of the population that is able to ingest the blood of different dragons to get other short term abilities that fade as they use them or the blood is digested. 
 The story took a while to get going, and felt a little stretched, but there was genuinely a lot here that was fun to ride along with. Dragons, contractors going out hunting them, and the interesting idea of the Blood Blessed were innovative enough to keep me going even when I felt that the story was slowing down. At the end there were a couple surprises that were very obvious and a couple that really got past me, and I will definitely be picking up the next in this series.