If you loved watching Ekata maneuver councillors and rivals after her family is frozen beneath the lake, you’ll click with Maia—an unprepared heir who suddenly inherits an empire in The Goblin Emperor. Like Ekata learning to read a treacherous court and turn vulnerabilities into leverage, Maia faces assassination plots, sabotage over bridges and airship projects, and a web of etiquette that can kill. It’s the same heady mix of peril, compassion, and razor-edged diplomacy—minus the ice, but with every audience and decree carrying life-or-death stakes.

Ekata’s hunt for the culprit behind her family’s magical stasis—tracking lies through the palace Above and the drowned halls Below—echoes in A Study in Drowning. Here, Effy follows a literary commission into a storm-battered manor and finds rot beneath revered stories. Like Ekata piecing together who benefits from the frozen dukes, Effy sifts manuscripts, myths, and threats to expose the power players profiting from a lie. It’s moody, maritime, and steeped in discovery, with revelations that hit as hard as a winter break in the ice.

If Ekata’s transformation—from forgotten scholarly daughter to a duke who decides what kind of ruler she’ll be—hooked you, The Midnight Lie offers that same charge. Nirrim begins obedient in a stratified city, then meets the alluring Sid and starts testing the rules that defined her. As Ekata weighs duty, truth, and her heart (including a slow-burn romance under all that ice), Nirrim untangles lies about her origins and the limits placed on her. Identity, agency, and a dangerous love story drive both tales.

You rooted for Ekata as she bargains with predators in her own court and turns a hostile winter palace into her ground. In Spinning Silver, Miryem, Wanda, and Irina do the same—striking perilous deals with a Staryk king, an all-too-human tyrant, and something even darker. Like Ekata navigating suitors, alliances, and an icy underworld, these women leverage wit and will against cold magic and colder politics, reshaping their futures one shrewd choice at a time.

If the layered world of Kylma—palace Above, palace Below, and the lake’s old magic—pulled you in, The City of Brass delivers that same immersive depth. As Ekata masters rituals, titles, and old grudges to stay alive, Nahri enters Daevabad and finds that every custom and alley has teeth. Court factions plot like your duke’s councillors, ancient bargains bite like the lake’s rules, and each revelation rewrites what power means in a city that remembers everything.