The third installment in Lynch’s popular Gentleman Bastard sequence, and the one that took the longest to write (some good five years). This time Jean and Locke find themselves caught in the crunch of Khartani making. Yes, the famous Khartani mages are back, with vengeance!
The novel starts almost exactly where Red Seas Under Red Skies ended, with Locke slowly dying of poison and Jean slowly dying of guilt. And who their final savior could be, if not a Bondsmage, and not just any Bondsmage, but one of the most powerful, brilliant and ruthless of them, who, accidentally, is also Falconer’s mother?
[Should I have put a spoiler alert? Well, I’m sure I have your attention by now :). And I promise no more spoilers (although this one is revealed very early on, so I don’t count it as a real spoiler).]
Because of course, Patience turns out to be not only savior, but also a client of our thieving duo. She has a nice little job for them, a piece of cake compared to what they’ve already been through – they are commissioned to rig an election at Khartain in favor of the magi-backed contenders. There’s only one tiny problem: the magi playing for the other side have their champion already in Khartain – and that champion is Sabetha.
The second installment in Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard sequence, Red Seas Under Red Skies, poses something of a conundrum to me. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven once again – if you saw the movie you know it was made with one thing in mind, and one thing only: fun. Sheer, flamboyant and infectious fun. The movie was illogical, flimsy, with a few really lame jokes, and at times utterly dumb, but if you were in for a ride, you didn’t mind that too much. You just enjoyed it till it lasted.
The Lies of Locke Lamora is the first book in the Gentleman Bastard sequence. Not trilogy, not anymore – the plan is for seven books in the series, maybe even more. The book was published in 2006 by Gollancz, and followed a year later by Red Seas Under Red Skies. There was over six-years break between the second and the third installment, and The Republic of Thieves hit the shelves in October 2013, to be followed by The Thorn of Emberlain in 2016. It took some time, as Lynch puts it, to recover his abilities to push the story forward, but recover he did, and the books keep coming. His is one of the rare cases where rights to the first book were purchased when the book was not yet written – Lynch had only sixty pages of it.