The Blood Traitor (The Prison Healer Book 3)

What I Loved: This book was one of my most highly anticipated books of the year. It absolutely delivered in being the type of book sure to make me unable to stop until late in the night and wait desperately to get home from work to finish it. This is the type of series that I keep on my shelves to loan to all my friends so we can discuss it afterward.
So many things went wrong at the end of Gilded Cage for Jaren and Kiva when her identity was revealed and her sister, Zuleeka secretly shipped her off to Zalindov prison under the influence of heavy drugs. The opening of the book did a fantastic job of plumbing the depths of Kiva’s despair and torment both physically from the withdrawal of the drugs she was unwillingly dosed with, her self-loathing of her betrayal, and the back-breaking prison labor. The author does caution that the portrayal of her drug addiction could be triggering for some audiences.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jaren’s resistance to forgiving her. Given the depths of his feelings and the seriousness of the events at the end of Gilded Cage, it wouldn’t have felt genuine if he had forgiven as easily as Caldon did. I was hanging onto the page at every tormented encounter waiting for him to crack and finally grant her some peace and love.
The introduction of the foreign King Navok was a bit surprising. It allowed for a lot of the plot to go the path it needed because then they needed a grand quest that forced Jaren into close proximity to Kiva and guaranteed peril so that it overrides his anger at her. However, they already had a lot to deal with through the plotline of Zuleeka that it often felt like two books were taking place within one. In order to keep the events to one book, characters had suspicious reveals of abilities and royal backgrounds that wrapped the plot up quicker and let them travel faster than normal. That wasn’t as satisfying but I may just have been desperate to stay in the world longer and wished this was more than a trilogy.
Final Verdict: The relationship between Jaren and Kiva was superbly rendered. I was tearing up and totally invested in seeing them repair what was broken between them. That portion of the book was so strong that I will gently overlook some of the parts that felt rushed because I will be reading this book again.