Jade City (The Green Bone Saga, #1)
by Fonda Lee
Took a while (100+ pages iirc) to get into, but then it moved well. Great intricate plot, really well done political conflict and characterizations. The thought of reading another 1000 pages to continue the story makes me tired, though, so I'm probably not going to.
The character work was the most impressive tbh - how many times are you told a character is charismatic? But scenes like the one between Hilo and one of the chief politicians, where they don't like each other but Hilo brings him around by telling him why it's in his interest and then seals it by making a comment about how funny it is that even though they hate everything about each other they're going to be besties if they survive -- damn. You can actually see how that kind of relationship is built. Characters repeatedly brought me around to seeing their point of view even as I didn't like or agree with them.
Much of the book is male dominated (maybe one of the reasons it took me a while to get into it at the start), but eventually several female characters become more central and get more POV chapters, and there's one queer person so far.