** spoiler alert ** This was my first reread of Wheel of the Infinite and the book keeps getting better, because I roughly know the plot now and can concentrate on the interaction of the characters or the lovely world-building as I like.

There certainly is enough of interest left with the solution to this book for a few follow-ups, but from the author's LJ I gather that she isn't working in this world at all at the moment.

Being 43 years old myself, it was such a pleasure to have an older woman, but still in the prime of her life, dealing - with all of her competence and all of her power, but also all of her mistakes and regrets - with a world-threatening danger and still be believably interested and concerned in the former relationships that she returns to when she finally visits her home city and resumes the position she was exiled from years ago. Oh, and build a new partnership on the side, with a very competent, very tasty man who is at least 10 years younger than she is ^^.

Martha Wells doesn't have to lead the reader by the hand to discover the attraction between Rian and Maskelle (another kudos for having the whole setting in a successful empire of people of colour, Maskelle being one, born and trained to be elite and then making mistakes that are unavoidable - as the story explains - and cost many lives, among them her third husband's). They don't talk about it but when you read carefully - as I did on this re-read - you see the small signs of when the attraction starts from both sides and how they comfortably both turn it into something bigger than mere lust.

(view spoiler)[By the nature of the god whom Maskelle serves Rian is one piece in the puzzle she needs to make the ultimate desire of the god come true, as well as lead her world out of danger. The fact that we find out that this danger was actually deliberately generated by the god for his own purposes is adressed explicitly and eventually leads to the god falling under his own stated laws and ceasing to be. (hide spoiler)]

Don't worry, this book is a standalone and has a happy ending ^^, at least as much as Maskelle, who finally learns to forgive herself for her costly mistakes which made her public enemy number one, can bear, anyway.