Red Seas Under Red Skies

DNF at 60%. This was my second try, I still can't stand this book for multiple reasons.

Lets start out with saying I absolutely adored the first book. It was fantastic, witty, charming, with characters that made me attached. Then shit went down at the end and yeah.

Here we have Locke and Jean, moving to a new city. Old habits die hard, they can't live an honest life, so they get tangled up in crime again.

Lets just start out with pointing out that this book is long. Don't get me wrong, long books are fine, I have nothing against them, if they are written in a tight way. Here? None of that. the first HALF of the book is just a bunch of oh so (in)convenient way of Locke and Jean being noticed by basically everyone in the city, everyone wanting to recruiting them, just the two of them playing on all sides and none on any of them. It didn't feel smart, just... try hard.
Especially annoying for a book with a BURNING SHIP on the cover that has close to no ships until about half way in. I'm sorry, but it all felt like dragging as hell as we STILL had no pirates, STILL had no pirates, then when they arrived, they were ridiculous.

Mr. Lynch seems to have a sailing fetish. One we have ships, every sentence has 56 random seafaring related words that meant literally nothing to me. They could have been in ancient Chinese ballet slang, written in hieroglyphs. The funny thing is, not even the protagonists understood it, nobody did, it was just chucked around to make me feel like I had a stroke. Niiiice.

The characters are ridiculous as well. “We follow this pirate captain because she is our best chance. Oh, so she recruits random other pirates she takes on after she takes over their ships? While her very small children are running around? What could go wroooong?” It really feels like Mr. Lynch believes that criminals are all super reasonable people, none of the are prone to revenge or just going “I don't fucking care”. You can tell them they will be killed if they hurt the free roaming kids of someone they do have a reason to dislike.
It just... feels like he never met any human beings.

I love Jean. Always did. My beef is, though, that the only time something happened from his point of view was when he talked to his insta-love girl. Thanks for nothing.

There were barely any actual tricks in this. I loved the first book for that, not for random, boring chains of events. Not even the occasional good joke could change that. I'm sorry, but this book pissed me off. I really hated it. It made no sense, I couldn't justify finishing it.