Queen of Shadows

Queen of Shadows is a fantasy novel by the American writer Sarah J. Maas, published in 2015 and the fourth book of her Throne of Glass series. It continues the story of Celaena Sardothien, who has returned to the empire she was raised to serve, and it is the first volume in which she operates openly rather than under an assumed identity.

The novel's starting point is that everyone Celaena loves has been taken from her. She comes back to the capital to rescue her former kingdom and to face what she has been avoiding, and much of the book is her working out who can be trusted among the people she left behind, while her friends pursue their own parts of the campaign elsewhere.

Maas writes the series as a long plot with a large cast, so this volume spends its time putting allies into place and settling accounts raised in the earlier books. It is the point at which the series' various storylines begin to converge, with the capital as the place where most of them meet.