I hadn’t read the first book in the series as initially I wasn’t aware it was in a series but in any case, according to the author, it’s ok to read these books as standalones too. I just picked this book up randomly in a sale. The story was okay but I would say because of the cliffhanger in this book it’s not really right to read it as a standalone and I feel I have to read the next book now to see what happens, but I wasn’t that invested in this book tbh, so I don't know if I will move on to the rest of the story! I felt like nothing really happened until the last 15% of this book. As other reviews said, you don’t learn much about where the story is going for most of this book…
I also was pretty confused with all the different characters most of the time, which, again, makes it hard to consider this a book you can read as a standalone. If I had read book 1 then I would probably have been able to tell the characters apart better in this book. Definitely needs to be read as a series but even then, this book would be pretty slow to reveal anything about the overall plot!