The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath, by Ian Green. It's got a cool world built, but it depends so heavily on feeble flashbacks and snippets of 'documents' at the beginning of each chapter to provide historical context and character backstory that it couldn't support the story it wanted to tell. It felt like book 2 of a trilogy, requiring readers to draw on knowledge and character arcs set up in book 1 to truly appreciate it. Except there is no book 1, so everything felt under-explained and emotionally dead.
