All hands on deck for Robert Redick’s excellent follow-up to his debut, The Red Wolf Conspiracy. The setting remains the IMS Chathrand, a truly mammoth sailing ship whose purported mission, to delivery the Treaty Bride to her wedding and thus cement the peace between two rival empires, is merely a cover for the machinations of numerous other parties – the Imperial spymaster Sandor Ott, who hopes to precipitate a civil war that will fatally weaken the Mzithrin empire; the dangerously deranged Captain Rose, who must deliver him; the sorcerer Arunis, who is planning to harness the power of the dreaded Nilstone to some diabolical end; and the tiny Ixchel, who are stowed away in the hold.

Arrayed against these sometimes evil and sometimes just misguided forces are the tarboys Pazel and Neeps, the unwilling Treaty Brize, Thasha, her bodyguard Hercol and the woken (sentient) rat Felthrup. Their success at the end of the first volume in depriving Arunis of both his puppet, the Shaggat Ness, and the Nilstone, has brought no more that a stay of execution – the baddies are still on board, as is the Nilstone, and once Thasha is ingeniously liberated from her obligation to marry a strange prince, the mission, to cross the Ruling Sea and ultimately deliver the Shaggat Ness to where he can foment civil war, continues.

What is so clever about this book is the choice of setting – the Chathrand is a huge ship, which provides lots of scope for hidden meetings, factions, whispers of mutiny, and characters not to see each other for days at a time. On the other hand, it is still a ship sailing in to peril, so to whatever extent the characters may dislike one another, they are sometimes compelled to co-operate for the survival of the ship, not least when the Nillstone causes the mutation of the ship’s rats in to bloodthirsty, sentient beasts. During the course of the voyage there are various encounters with magical phenomena, fell weather and strange lands, and the Chathrand does well to make it across the Ruling Sea – but the balance of power on the ship is very different to when they left.

Redick also gives us our first glimpses of Pazel’s sister, and follows the awful fate of Thatsha’s father, but the Chathrand is the real focal point for this entire book. You might wonder whether it could get stale, but there’s enough action, and developing dynamics between the characters, to keep things moving along at a rollicking page, with the growing but awkward love between Pazel and Thasha a recurring theme, and plenty of revelations about other key characters. Readers may also start to speculate about the identity of our narrator, who is starting to be a bit more vocal.

A great follow-up to The Red Wolf Conspiracy. Roll on the final volume of the trilogy, The Night of the Swarm.

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