This series has many good parts but it's all overshadowed by one thing until the bitter end.
It tries soo hard to make the protagonists seem ruthless and cruel but at the same time can't stop showing the same characters as the knights in shining armour.
It's like dissociative identity disorder.
You can't have the cake and eat it too.
If you want a morally questionable, dark grey character then you have to commit to it! Not this constant back and forth like MUHAHAHA I am so evil, look at me how evil I am and then she goes and rescues some children for no reason. It's truly offputting.
It's really like two authors with vastly different ideas of how the moral compass should look alternated in writing this.
Because of this dichotomy I could never really confirm if the naive parts were the MC showing another side or just bad writing.
Wait, these books actually have two authors. Maybe that was part of the problem? Idk...

The other big issue this series has especially later on is powerlevels.
Certain characters are hopelessly op but to create danger the author needs to mess with it all and find bogous explanations why this specific situation is suddenly somehow dangerous. This happens repeatedly and it annoyed me every time. If you need real danger then either make up the rules beforehand so the reader knows about the danger or just don't make your characters ridiculously strong.
Again, you can't have it both ways.

The ending of the series is pretty terrible and not at all what you would expect from a series like that. Careful, mild spoiler for the final book! The last book follows the most standard default clichée pattern of fantasy with fighting the big bad and the final big battle between good and evil and everything (guess on which side our cast belongs, guess again) which I felt was entirely out of character when looking at the rest of the series.

Honestly, I would recommend to stop after the third book and make up your own ending in your head. It's almost certainly better than the reality.
It's not all terrible, don't get me wrong. It just doesn't live up to the promise of the first three books. It falls short on all the major implicit promises and falls back on stereotypes and clichées instead.

After all the ranting I want to address a few of the good parts.
Initially the story manages very well to show us deeply flawed and complex characters that are not easily placable on a good to evil scale. The story tries a bit too hard to tell us how not good the protagonists are which gets increasingly insistent in later books but is not too bad in the earlier books.
Show, don't tell would be a huge improvement across the series but the author(s) know how to show. They just don't always do it for some reason.

I very much enjoyed to finally read about a fmc that is actually able to outwitt everyone repeatedly sometimes in a spectacular fasion. ( )

My thirst for power fantasy takes me to weird but entertaining places ( )

Good garbage

The prose is clean. It is well crafted. The plot is intricately wrought. The characters built painstakingly.

And it’s all garbage.

A former slave (who has had 17 masters but is now free?) lashes out against violence because...I mean, of course she does. She wears tight leather pants because...that’s what former slaves wear?

By the way, most carriage horses are not trained to saddle. As in, no matter what happens in the movies you can’t just ride any old carriage horse. Not to mention, no bridle or saddle. Because carriage.

That’s really what happened here. The authors seem to have taken all of their cues from tv and movies. For instance, poor people generally didn’t wear tight leather pants.

This is bad romance writing with the trappings of dark fantasy. ( )

Good garbage

The prose is clean. It is well crafted. The plot is intricately wrought. The characters built painstakingly.

And it’s all garbage.

A former slave (who has had 17 masters but is now free?) lashes out against violence because...I mean, of course she does. She wears tight leather pants because...that’s what former slaves wear?

By the way, most carriage horses are not trained to saddle. As in, no matter what happens in the movies you can’t just ride any old carriage horse. Not to mention, no bridle or saddle. Because carriage.

That’s really what happened here. The authors seem to have taken all of their cues from tv and movies. For instance, poor people generally didn’t wear tight leather pants.

This is bad romance writing with the trappings of dark fantasy. ( )