When entering the world of fantasy and sci-fi novels, of which you could call Keys the steampunky fantasy with modern appeal, the biggest factor for me as to how a story is approached is the level of detail taken into world-building, the surreal, magic, dreams, and all other aspects that are not the physical actions that advance the plot. One end of the spectrum could be the Malazan books that delve highly into the surreal and creating an incredibly complex world, while the other could be The Hunger Games--a matter-of-fact effort that only gave names to those who mattered and didn't mind killing a major character with a couple of sentences and no embellishment.Keys of Candor is closer to that matter-of-fact model with some very appropriate detail and surrealism. Everything is still action here, the trickiest part is keeping that interesting pace when writing this kind of book, as one could see with the consistent decline of The Hunger Games books that seemed to speed up from page to page. The result, when done poorly, can be a story that unwinds itself and tries to correct course with an annoying array of Deus Ex Machina's.The beginning of the story had some fumblings with the rapid pace mostly because the character development is so hard to pin down in a story structure such as this. However, by about 30% of the way through the book onward, I was less concerned about the rapid changes in location and advancing of storyline (we trot across nearly the whole continent a couple times in this quick-read of a book) due to the quality of the weaving stories.It's told as point-of-view book (a la Song of Ice and Fire aka Game of Thrones, except in full third person) and does so exceedingly well. Even in ol George RR Martin's classic, I found much of a certain dragon lady's initial quest to be largely skippable. None of the main characters in this novel suffer from having a weak part of their story.It is a co-authored book, and it does not come across that way. It seems well structured from the beginning and knows where it is going. There was a point in time where I power-walked on the treadmill for 90 minutes straight reading this thing and hardly realized that much time had passed. It is a good read. Period.However, the clear victim of having a book with such streamlined action and a story on rails is character complexity. Once a character is established as "good" or "bad" (the only suspense is their mystery upon first meeting them), it's hard to imagine them ever changing when they're either on the run or wrapped up in a plot they continue to push forward. I'm not giving up on this, though, since this book is only the beginning and the sequel is already out. Besides, as I mentioned before, the pace of The Hunger Games was similar and had similarly static characters as a result and only got worse as time went on. I wouldn't be surprised if this story only improved over time. You won't find Varys from GoT here with little snippets or subterfuge you only learn about later, but you'll find plenty of brutally captivating action and a well-constructed plot with character choices that make sense that leads to a fast, easily understandable read.TL;DR - the book is very good and worth your time. It is a superb first effort by the authors and, with a sequel already complete to good reviews, is establishing a very promising universe of stories that will continue to be added to.