By Virginia Goddard.  This was recommended by someone on the Wave Without a Shore site, and one of the Amazon reviewers was reminded of the Foreigner series.

It's set in a world where magic has the function that technology has in ours, some time after a catastrophic failure that wiped out the infrastructure, causing disruption, death, starvation--(I was left thinking "that could happen here").  While society and government are functioning again, it's not the same as it was.

The focus is on character development and their interactions, with knowledge about the setting gradually appearing in the background.  I very much enjoyed the book, although it has almost nothing in common with what I usually read.