The Collapsing Empire; The Consuming Fire; The Last Emperox by Jon Scalzi

 Spent the last few evenings reading this trilogy. Scalzi being Scalzi, of course, but writing something at least passable as Space Opera. Bold move to make so extensive and interesting a setting and then destroy it--well, technically, wrap the series with the ending of it being inevitable, but with there being something like long-term hope for the people living in it. Also after bringing all the amoral vortices of greed in the novel to something like justice. The voice is definitely recent Scalzi, though there's probably more depth and substance here than in novels like *Kaiju Preservation Society* or *Starter Villain*. The characters are just spot-on (and if the sense I get that Kiva Lagos is everyone's favorite is correct, that's earned) and the various threads move and dodge and weave nicely. It's probably easier to read what's effectively a 1,000-page novel when it's broken up into installments like this. Back in the dim and distant past, I read the first book, figure out there was no way it some of the pending plot elements were going to resolve in the book, and did some poking around and found out it was a planned trilogy, then started buying the books so I could read the completed trilogy at my leisure. Uh, I don't have a good reason that took me five years after it was completed. That's on me--this was a very good three-night read.