Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

The fourth Mistborn novel opens a new era and a new mood: shorter, lighter and funnier, closer to a western with magic than to the original trilogy. Some readers enjoy exactly that change. Others miss the earlier weight, find the plot easy to predict, and do not warm to Wayne. Treat it as an introduction to new characters, best read after the first three books.

Worth knowing The Alloy of Law, from 2011, opens the second Mistborn era, three hundred years after the trilogy, in a world that has got as far as railways, electric lights and revolvers; the religion is built on the heroes of the first books and the magic is the same, with Allomancy and Feruchemy now so diluted that most people have one power and a Twinborn has two. Waxillium Ladrian, a lawman from the frontier called the Roughs, comes home to the city of Elendel to run his family’s house and gets pulled back into a case of vanished freight cars and kidnapped heiresses, with his friend Wayne, who can speed up time in a bubble, and Marasi, who reads law. Brandon Sanderson wrote it as a short break and it became a four-book arc, ended by The Lost Metal in 2022.

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