Red Seas Under Red Skies is the second volume of Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards sequences, following on from the successful The Lies of Locke Lamora. The sequence is planned to be seven books long, so it’s a good job that the author demonstrates that the wonderful first volume was not a flash in the pan. Following the bloody finale of the first book, Locke Lamora (not his real name) and Jean Tannen (his real name) are all that is left of the Gentleman Bastards, the gang of master thieves and grifters. Driven to flee their home city of Camorr, they have headed for the city state of Tal Varrar, where we find them planning to fleece the city’s great gaming house, The Sinspire, with its high rollers and its impregnable vault.

The first half of the novel alternates between a series of flashbacks bringing us up to date with the Bastards’ schemes since they arrived in Tal Varrar, and the increasingly complex ongoing plot. As in the first volume, nothing really goes quite to plan for Locke and Jean – their designs on the Sinspire become entangled with the machinations of the city’s ruler, the Archon, and his ongoing power-struggle with the merchant elite, not to mention parties unknown making regular attempts on their lives. With so many enemies and schemes on the go, it all gets pretty complicated but Lynch managed to keep all the plates spinning. The red seas and red skies of the title are encountered when our heroes are forced to take to the ocean as makeshift pirates, in a conspiracy designed by the Archon to restore his waning popularity by stirring up a pirate revolt for him to crush. The nautical sequences, while maybe not up to the level of authenticity of Patrick O’Brian, are very well realised, and as Locke and Jean come to realise that pirates are just thieves afloat, and therefore their kind of people, their web of loyalties becomes notably more tangled, especially when Jean finds love. There’s most than a hint of Pirates of the Caribbean to these parts of the book, which is no bad thing.

Lynch introduces so many elements to the storyline that I was seriously starting to wonder how he was possibly going to be able to tie up all the loose ends by the end of the book, but he achieves it admirably and without any unsatisfactory shortcuts or deus ex machina. Red Seas Under Red Skies combines the pleasures of light fantasy, unburdened by too much back-story, with the Robin Hood thrill of stealing from the rich and the cleverness of the classic long-con grifter, in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven and Hustle. It also features some seriously likeable protagonists, and lots of avenues to be explored in future episodes. Highly recommended.

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