It's a good series, on the whole, but yes, it has enough gruesome moments that I'd hesitate to recommend it to some people. It's not sensationalistic about it, and the perpetrators tend to get their due, sometimes in equally horrible ways, but still. One could call Erikson escapist in a way, I suppose, as it's definitely not high literature, but it's both too complex (by far) and too dark to really fit that description.

And er, she didn't do much really. She is the wife of the leader of the people, creating resentment among various people who think they should be leader instead, and is perceived as arrogant and a slut (prior to her marriage, anyway; it doesn't help that her husband is a foreigner). When her husband goes around the bend and decides killing himself is the best course of action (as you can tell, I'd have to disagree...), the vacuum of power results in some kind of Night of the Long Knives, with various murders and Hetan's hobbling.