Daniel O'malley strikes again with his own brand of witty sarcasm and no punches pulled writing. I really enjoy his style of writing and I enjoyed a lot about this book but sadly there were a few things that may have worked well in The Rook but because of tree dynamics shift didn't sit quite right in this book. 
 First off what I did like! 
 1) I really enjoyed the continuation of Myfanwy's story, though in my opinion there wasnt enough from her perspective. 
 2) Odette and Felicity were fantastic characters and I really liked how diverse they were. 
 3) The villain that O'Malley brought into this book was heart wrenching but I think because of that emotion it made it so good. Sad but good. Too often, I think, villains are so unrelatable or are so pure evil that a reader can't really connect with them but O'Malley crafted his villain really well. 
 4) He kept me guessing. I really enjoy that about his writing and this book did not disappoint in that arena. 
 Now to what brought this book down to a 3 star review. 
 1) O'Malley introduced a character in the beginning of the book and made him seem like he would be, potentially, a more important fixture and perhaps a love interest and then after his powers are used and he is squared away we don't see him again until he reappears to have a very short conversation with Felicity then vanishes again until the very end of the book. This may be a silly thing to dislike but it really irritated me. I almost would have preferred O'Malley not bring him back because his stilted reappearance made it feel like O'Malley forgot about him then tossed him back in on a whim. 
 2) I've seen several reviews that had a problem with the lengthy history lessons that O'Malley would toss in, essentially interrupting the flow of the book for long chunks. In The Rook this style worked since it was in the style of a letter from Myfanwy #1 and it didn't feel like he was putting the current story on hold to wax poetic about something totally unrelated them remember to keep writing the current story. At the beginning of the Stiletto this format didn't bother me at all, I enjoyed it. The problem is, that the father into the book I went the more and more these expositions started to bother me. The main reason is that I felt like the histories were being repeated. Sure it was from different perspectives but I began to think "I know what happened here. I'm getting bored. Can we please see what is going on with Odette?". These sidebars should have been edited down significantly in my opinion because they just lost thier potency half way through the book and became a hindrance to the story telling in my opinion. 
 3) The crystals should have been a different book. It was an interesting enough sub plot that I was very sad with how O'Malley handled it. Honestly it felt to me like he looked at the book and thought, "people loved Myfanwy in the first book and they aren't going to be happy with the fact that she is sharing the main character slot with two others so I'm going to slip in this sub plot that will give Myfanwy more face time." I get why it was done but it didn't sit well with me because it felt contrived and didn't really fit. I would have much preferred to see this, like I did before, as a seperate book where Myfanwy was once again the main character and things could have been really fleshed out. 
 4) As with The Rook, this book had a lot of cussing. I know a lot of people will roll thier eyes at this but the amount of language used bothered me. 
 5) Lastly there were several swathes of this book where O'Malley head hops and it got for a bit confusing. This is by far my smallest complaint but I felt it warranted mention. 
 All in all this book was worth the read and of you liked The Rook go ahead and read this one. I hope that O'Malley keeps it up and keeps gracing us with his unique writing. style