Dangerous Gifts by Gaie Sebold

Last year I read a debut from Gaie Sebold. That book was Babylon Steel. It was great fun with solid world building and I looked very much forward to the sequel, which is Dangerous Gifts.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Babylon Steel was the portal city of Scalentine with it's many exotic characters. Another highly enjoyable part of Babylon Steel was the Red Lantern; the brothel that Babylon owns and runs, with it's orc cook Flower and top drawing worker; the fey Laney, as well as the duo of Cruel and Unusual who cater for those who want something a little different. There was also the developing relationship between Babylon and the were chief of police Hargur Bitternut.

The parts of Dangerous Gifts that did take place in Scalentine and dealt with the Red Lantern and it's staff were the strongest and most enjoyable sections of the book. Unfortunately they were too brief for my liking.

Most of the story deals with Babylon taking on a job body guarding Enthemmerlee; a religious figure of some importance to the Ikinchli (a race of oppressed reptilian creatures). Enthemmerlee was an important part of Babylon Steel, so that made sense that she would feature heavily in the follow up.

I didn't buy a lot of the plot and the tensions between the races of the Gudain and the Ikinchli were I felt a little too heavy handed. It also reminded me a lot of the relationship between the Narn and the Centauri in Babylon 5.

A lot of the book didn't seem to go anywhere and because Bitternut wasn't there a lot of the time I had trouble buying the closeness of he and Babylon's relationship.

The character of the dangerous and unstable wizard Mokraine was a good one though.

I think there's still more scope for Babylon Steel as a series and this was just the rough second book. If it focusses more on Scalentine and tightens the plot up a bit there's some highly entertaining future adventures for Babylon. The first book had a lot of humour and there were opportunities in Dangerous Gifts that simply weren't explored.

I'd advise anyone who was interested to start with Babylon Steel to get a real idea of the series' potential and I intend to stick with it if there is a third book, because there is more there than Dangerous Gifts really brings to the table.

Babylon Steel by Gaie Sebold

Babylon Steel is Gaie Sebold's debut novel and has been identified by the publisher Solaris as one of their releases to look for in 2012. The sequel Hunter's Moon has also been acquired by Solaris, so there's good news for anyone who enjoyed Babylon Steel.

Babylon Steel is a rather Xena Warrior Princess style sword for hire and brothel owner. Babylon lives and works in Scalentine, which is a kind of interdimensional portal. Most of Scalentine's inhabitants come there to escape their pasts, and Babylon is no exception. The chapters set in Scalentine are interspersed with others set on the world of Tiresana, Babylon's original home plane, and they cover her life before she found her way to Scalentine and set up her high class establishment the Red Lantern.

The strengths of Babylon Steel are the setting of Scalentine and the characters. The folk who work the Red Lantern from the S&M twins Cruel and Unusual, who cater for clients wanting a somewhat more memorable experience to the fey Laney, who can give clients the unique experience of having made love to a genuinely magical creature, or even the Orc cook and former pit fighter Flower, are not just employees, they share in the profits and they're as much family as anything else.

The inhabitants of Scalentine range from fey like Laney to four armed hermaphroditic aliens, and it is this world with all it's denizens and gutter crawlers that Babylon ranges through trying to find answers that will help her once and for all put her past truly behind her.

It's a real fun romp full of sex, violence and rock and... no sorry there's no rock and roll, but there possibly should be. Cruel and Unusual would make a great front pair for any rock band. Gaie, being British, does tend to use a peculiarly English form of street slang which she may want to cut down on for future books, because it tended to take me out of the alien landscape of Scalentine.

I did love the setting, though. Scalentine put me in mind of the Time Station from Robert Aspin and Linda Evan's Timescout series, which was a short lived series that I really enjoyed and still wonder why there weren't more books in it.

Despite Babylon Steel reading as a largely self contained story, it has been left open for further adventures, hence the sequel Hunter's Moon (I wonder if Hunter or Moon are going to be character names?), and I hope that the budding romance between the often on the wrong side of the law Babylon and Scalentine's head law enforcer the werewolf Chief Bitternut (shades of Alexia Tarabotti and Conall Maccon in Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate there) comes to something in the future.

My first new book of 2012 and both the year and Ms Sebold's career are off to a flying start.