Book Review: Shards Of An Empire by Adam Lawless

A South Asian immigrant’s disappointment.
Sayeed arrives in America believing in freedom, tolerance, and the promise of a better life. A Muslim immigrant with hope in his heart, he soon finds himself torn between family, culture, and a nation that does not always practice what it preaches. As injustice and hypocrisy mount, will Sayeed cling to his ideals—or will betrayal push him toward a darker path?
The Chinese spy who loved too deeply.
Jie rises swiftly through the ranks of China’s MSS, driven by brilliance, discipline, and ambition. But her greatest weakness is the one thing she cannot control—her heart. Preyed upon by a married man, her beauty and vulnerability ignite obsession wherever she goes. In Washington, D.C., love tempts her once more.
The Arab dreamer on the edge of ruin.
Ahmed, a poor but joyful youth from Iraq, is manipulated into stealing a sacred Islamic relic from Uzbekistan—an act that destroys his life and reshapes geopolitics. Captured and imprisoned in China, he is stripped of dignity, belief, and mercy. What survives his confinement is no longer innocent. When he finally emerges, the question is no longer if he will be used—but by whom.
Shards of an Empire is a bleak, high-stakes political thriller where nations maneuver through human weakness and love is the most exploitable asset of all. As these four lives converge, the world inches toward collapse—not with a bang, but with quiet decisions made in dark rooms.
History will call it unavoidable.
The truth is far more personal.

Review

Shards Of An Empire by Adam Lawless is a geopolitical thriller that braids together multiple POVs. The book’s biggest strength is its ambition of scope: four protagonists from radically different contexts are pulled into the same widening blast radius: Brian O’Neill, a Delta Force colonel disgraced by a catastrophic mission; Sayeed, a Muslim immigrant chasing (and testing) the American dream; Jie, a rising MSS operative whose personal life and professional life keep bleeding into each other; and Ahmed, a “happy-go-lucky” Iraqi youth manipulated into a relic-theft mission that turns into something far darker.

What I enjoyed most is how author Lawless builds parallel pressures across these lives with ambition, belonging, loyalty, and desire so the novel feels like four different angles on the same question: who gets to feel safe, forgiven, and free in a world built on unequal power? Brian’s arc carries the muscular, kinetic energy you’d expect from a military opening (the book throws you into the chaos fast), while Sayeed’s thread brings the emotional and ideological tension of assimilation, hope curdling into disillusionment when ideals don’t match reality.

Jie and Ahmed, though, are where the novel’s most haunting notes land. Jie’s chapters blend tradecraft with vulnerability, she’s positioned as capable and ascending, yet repeatedly confronted by the cost of attachment and the way obsession can masquerade as love. Ahmed’s storyline is the most classically tragic: faith, poverty, and coercion converge into a “mission” framed as devotion, complete with a stolen relic and an expanding web of handlers who keep him blind to the true game being played. Without spoiling the mechanics of how it all locks together, I will say that the novel doesn’t flinch from the brutal idea that ordinary people are often just pieces moved by someone else’s hand, and the book makes that “master manipulator” theme explicit.

Critically, the same ambition that makes this story compelling can also make it feel dense and high-velocity as you’re asked to track multiple arcs, multiple moral frameworks, and a widening conspiracy as it accelerates. If you like thrillers that feel realistic, political, and morally knotted, and where romance doesn’t soften the world but sharpens i, this will hit. And if you’re the kind of reader who loves an epilogue-style historical sting (the book frames “empire” as something that echoes across centuries), the closing “Prelude/Postlude” cements that larger thesis in a way that’s both unsettling and memorable.

Shards of an Empire is big, bold, and unapologetically intense with equal parts spy intrigue and emotional unraveling, written for readers who enjoy stories where the personal is political, and love is never just love; it’s leverage, risk, and occasionally the only remaining rebellion.

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