Red Seas Under Red Skies

The Gentlemen Bastards at Sea

Scott Lynch’s second Gentlemen Bastards novel finds Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen in Tal Verrar — a different city from Camorr, with different codes and different opportunities. They have spent two years working their way toward the inside of the Sinspire: the most exclusive, the most secure, and reputedly the most robber-proof casino in the world. Their plan, characteristically over-ambitious and characteristically clever, is proceeding exactly as designed when Stragos, the Archon of Tal Verrar, forces them into an entirely different assignment.

Stragos needs pirates. Or rather, he needs someone to manufacture a pirate threat that he can use to justify expanding his military authority. Locke and Jean — given slow-acting poison as incentive — find themselves crewing a ship they cannot sail, learning seamanship under hostile conditions, and attempting to conduct both a nautical crime spree and a casino heist simultaneously.

Locke and Jean

If The Lies of Locke Lamora was about Locke’s charisma and the tragedy of losing his found family, Red Seas Under Red Skies is about the friendship between Locke and Jean — tested here more severely than in the first book, and emerging as the series’ most important and most moving relationship. Lynch is a writer who understands that the deepest conflicts in adventure fiction are internal and relational rather than merely physical, and the emotional weight he places on the Locke-Jean dynamic pays off.

Two Plots, One Novel

The novel’s structural challenge is that its two narrative strands — the Sinspire heist and the forced piracy — compete for priority throughout. Neither is abandoned; both are executed with considerable skill; but the reader who loved the focused heist architecture of the first book may find the division of attention frustrating. Lynch is testing his range, and the test is largely successful, even if the result is slightly less coherent than its predecessor.

The World Expands

Tal Verrar is a different fantasy city from Camorr — built on artificial islands, oriented toward trade and commerce, its power structures more openly mercantile. Lynch uses the contrast to show that the Gentlemen Bastards’ skills are genuinely portable, but that every new city demands a new education in its particular codes. The expansion of the Gentlemen Bastards universe is one of the series’ ongoing pleasures.

Our rating: 4.2/5