Hmm, yeah, I feel like the romance might have had more of a chance of working for me because I do enjoy the general Nahadoth character type to a degree (dangerous but non-evil agent of chaos who cares about people nonetheless) but the book never actually succeeded in making me feel into the romance. Or into Nahadoth for that matter, now I think on it. Possibly it's that he's just so SERIOUS all the time, no sense of humour evident.

But honestly I took the romance as being a fairly background plot point and irrelevant to the main story, which.............now that I think about it is clearly my aro-ace goggles at work because in retrospect it's pretty important to the whole business of what's going on? Oops. Maybe my lack of being into the romance is a bigger part of why the book didn't hold my attention than I thought.