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Audiobook details
A destiny claimed and already curdling
The war between the four elemental nations of the Waning Lands has bled into a stalemate, but the dead keep accumulating. Everest Arcadia has claimed the title of the Void, the prophesied power that was supposed to determine the conflict's outcome. Now that she has what she always wanted, the path her father laid out for her no longer feels like the right one. The doubts come quietly at first. They do not stay quiet.
Vesper Dragonsbane is a Sky Witch with a narrower purpose than the war: the man who killed her sisters is still alive, and she is closing in. When her path converges with Everest's, they carry a problem neither anticipated. Something old is stirring beneath Never Keep, and the four-nation war consuming the Waning Lands may have been fought over ground already claimed by something that predates every banner and every grudge.
Peckham and Valenti build the third Sins of the Zodiac book through dual female perspectives, keeping the enemies-to-lovers tension alive in both storylines while driving a world-level threat that neither protagonist can address alone. Bridget Bordeaux and Jake Bordeaux return as narrators across 19 hours and 27 minutes, as morally fractured and absorbing as the series has been since Never Keep.
I came to this book having read Never Keep and Shattered Sky, which shaped how the opening registers. The series does a specific thing well: a world where loyalty is always provisional and magic carries real costs. Cinder Vale is where those threads start converging in ways that neither protagonist can sidestep. Everest has the power she spent two books reaching for. The problem is that she now sees whose plan she has been walking inside, and it is not hers.
The Void storyline is the slower of the two, deliberately. Peckham and Valenti are interested in what comes after power is acquired, specifically the moment when you understand what the people who helped you get there actually wanted. Everest's father is a carefully drawn political schemer, and the book reveals his longer game through accumulated small inconsistencies rather than a single confrontation. That structural choice holds up across 19 hours.
Vesper's arc moves faster and hits harder. Her grief is specific: she knows who killed her sisters. The book tracks her closing in without sentimentalizing any of it. What shifts the moral logic of her storyline is that her target turns out to be connected to what is happening beneath Never Keep, which pulls her into a conflict she never agreed to and complicates everything she planned to do when she finally got close enough.
The section where the two storylines intersect is the strongest in the book. Cinder Vale earns its enemies-to-lovers tension because neither character has any particular interest in forgiving the other, and the pull between desire and ideology is drawn out at a pace that rewards the patience the earlier volumes asked for. The ending does not resolve either relationship cleanly. That is both the right choice and an irritating one, in roughly equal measure.
Bridget Bordeaux and Jake Bordeaux have narrated the full series. At 19 hours and 27 minutes, the dual narration keeps the two female perspectives sonically distinct, which matters when a book spends this much time inside the internal logic of characters who read the same world with completely opposite assumptions. Neither performance reaches for emotion the text has not already set up.
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Cinder Vale (Sins of the Zodiac, Book 3) by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti returns to the Waning Lands, where the war between the four elemental nations has reached a stalemate and the ground is shifting beneath it. Everest Arcadia, now known as the Void, has claimed the power she was destined for and is beginning to see whose ambitions she has been serving. Vesper Dragonsbane, a Sky Witch hunting the man who killed her sisters, finds her private war colliding with something far larger when what lurks beneath Never Keep begins to wake. This is a Zodiac Academy spin-off series, dark and self-contained, with dual female protagonists whose storylines converge under pressure in the final third of the book.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, to hear Bridget Bordeaux and Jake Bordeaux narrate this 19 hrs and 27 mins audiobook. The dual narration keeps the two perspectives distinct across a long listen, and the performance carries the emotional weight of a story where both leads are making decisions they cannot easily undo.
Once you download the audiobook, it stays yours permanently, even if you cancel before the trial ends. The free trial also gives you access to thousands of other titles at no extra cost. Start listening now.
US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
