Shame on me, for taking so long to read a book that I always expected to like yet somehow never quite got round to starting until recently. Robert V.S. Redick’s fantasy debut is an enjoyable, fast-paced and engaging book that left me wanting more (and fortunately, the second volume in the trilogy, The Rats and the Ruling Sea, is published at the end of October). There are shades of Scott Lynch’s approach to fantasy in Redick’s work: he does not sacrifice pace or narrative verve on the altar of excessive world-building, and he imbues his characters and plot with a hint of the melodramatic, to create fantasy that does not try to take itself too seriously, and which carries the reader along nicely.

The Red Wolf Conspiracy tells the tale of the I.M.S. Chathrand, a gigantic merchant ship that would, by the sound of it, dwarf even the biggest sailing vessels that we are familiar with. The Chathrand is at the centre of a web of intrigue and, as the title suggests, conspiracy, involving two mighty empires, mages both good and evil, a possibly insane ship’s captain, warrior-like little people (think Borrowers with more martial arts skills), sentient or ‘woken’ animals, mer-people and much else besides.

Trapped in the middle of it all is Pazel Pathkendle, a tarboy (ship’s boy) – Pazel does not know where his parents are (his father’s name being a byword for treachery), and the efforts of his witch mother to imbue him with a gift have left him with a talent for language that comes and goes. To Pazel’s working class hero we must add child of privilege Thasha Isiq, the same age as Pazel but raised in luxury, her father an Admiral and then an Ambassador – but Thasha is not master of her own destiny, for she is to be the Treaty Bride, married to a scion of the rival Mzithrin Empire, apparently to cement an uneasy peace. Both are central to the discovery of conspiracy and deceit, as it becomes apparent that the voyage of the Chathrand is far from being what it appears.

Pazel and Thasa accumulate a range of allies – the miniature Ixchel, the shape-shifting sorcerer Ramachni, an eloquent awoken rat called Felthrup – and enemies, among the ship’s crew and the ringleader of the conspiracy, the Imperial spymaster Sandor Ott. It’s a ripping yarn – Redick does not get bogged down in exposition (apart from when he brings all the strands together at the end ), and does not feel the need to follow all of his main characters through the whole of the story’s timeline, making for some skips and jumps that keep things flowing very well. As the first book of a trilogy, The Red Wolf Conspiracy succeeds as an adventure on its own terms, as a means of introducing a world and some characters that we can care about, and as a way of making the reader want to move on to the next volume. Fortunately, that’s sitting on my desk, so I shall be doing just that. Expect a review here very shortly…

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