Ultimately, each of the three books so far follows a single compelling theme:

• The Grace of Kings is the simplest: it is the rise of power of Kuni Garu, the bandit who would become king.
• The Wall of Storms is a story about the clash of civilizations and the lengths people will go to in times of desparation.
• The Veiled Throne, in turn, is about negotiating cultural fusion, particularly when faced with the twin challenges of history and misinformation.

I think this book has some of the best moments in the series (in particular, the pay off at the end), but its also the longest and thus least-efficient of the series. The characters finally have some depth, but the chapter distribution is still shaky, leaving me to miss GRRM's POV chapter style, though he ended up writing himself into a corner s.t. ASOIAF 4 and 5 were so tedious to read because he refused to do what Liu does in the way of jumping around to advance the plot. There's tradeoffs, but I still think that series like ASOIAF or First Law are more "coherent" stories, and this still feels somewhere in between a history and a fantasy. Some parts are super corny/fable-istic, others are intensely dark, while still others are lengthy asides discussing technical details that would be fitting in a Stephenson novel....

Whereas the second book had its own diatribe about strategy through the equivalent game of Go, this third book has its own version of chess with.

Having to grab rob in order to get old scrolls that have accurate information about the rules that women played by that was retconned by the moralists.

Some grim dark scenes a la baby down the well.

The Iron Chef arc in the last half of the book is simultaneously the best and the worst part of the book lol. Like,,, Liu is clearlyy just having fun with it, but it doesn't quite make sense in terms of narrative emphasis relative to the gravity of everything that preceeded it.

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