What Song the Sirens Sang

What Song the Sirens Sang (Gideon Sable 3) by Simon R. Green

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3P25U8MR2P6LR?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

I am a fan of Green's Night Side series. I understood that halfway through the series, the stories became formulaic and hostage to fan service. However, I was a fan and wanted to see Razor Eddie and Shotgun Suzie come onstage and be put through their paces. Green is creative and clever with his naming and deft construction of fairly two-dimensional characters.

Green's subsequent series seems to be an effort to strike the Dark Side magic. This is the first book in the Gideon Sable series that I've read, but the main character - a man who calls himself Gideon Sable - is a kind of John Smith character. He's not a detective; he's a thief. He doesn't have the gift of finding things, but he has a compass that points unerringly to what he needs. He resolves problems by invoking friends, having a plan, and pulling information out of his arse.

Nonetheless, the Sable world inhabits some offshoot of the Night Side in Green's metaverse. Not canonically, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Sable wander into the Night Side in some future book. The characters would fit into the Night Side quite easily. We have Annie Anybody, who switches personalities, Switch-it-Suzie, who can will something to be replaced with something else, and Lex the Damned, who killed an angel and a demon and fashioned perfect armor from their halos.

The story is pedestrian. Green's writing style involves a lot of exposition and information dumps. He will spend a lot of time building up how awful or powerful some person is, we will meet the person, he will either be much nicer than we imagine or Sable will call in a friend or invoke a favor to neutralize the person, and we will move on to the next obstacle.

This is all good fun but it doesn't have a high calory content. It is enjoyable for a few hours of diversion, which is not a bad thing.