Winter

Meanwhile, Cinder, the cyborg mechanic who is secretly Luna's lost princess, arrives on the moon with Emperor Kai, the pilot Thorne, the hacker Cress, the android Iko and the rest of her crew, determined to rally the oppressed outer sectors against the queen. Scarlet, captured in the previous book, is held in the palace, where she forms an unlikely friendship with Winter. The plot jumps between many characters and moves at a great pace.

At more than eight hundred pages, this is a doorstop of a book, yet it rarely drags. Meyer ties together threads from all the earlier novels, gives each couple its moments, and borrows cleverly from Snow White, including a poisoned apple and a mirror-obsessed queen. There are battles, injuries and a ruthless villain, so it is more intense than Cinder, but humour, especially from Thorne and Iko, keeps the mood from becoming too dark.

For fans of the series, Winter is the reward for staying the course: big, warm-hearted and thoroughly satisfying. Newcomers should begin with Cinder. The companion books Fairest and Stars Above add backstory and epilogues. About 832 pages in the Square Fish paperback.