The Gomorrah Gambit by Tom Chatfield

 

This was a pretty good book, really--not deathless, but good enough to spend and evening with. If I'm reading the signs correctly and it's book one of a series ... well, it's not good enough for me to chase down the rest of the series, but I'm a tough sell on that at best. The prose sparkles and shines, dances and sings; the characters all seem reasonably plausible considering that some of them are clearly larger than life. The implausibilities of the book don't matter all that much in the context of the book, things start almost normal and things build gradually to kinda bizarre, but the next thing is always pretty easy to swallow if your disbelief is still hanging overhead. There are some occasional moments of insight, here, and probably some vague thematic threads related to trust and power and suchlike, but this is not a very complex novel as far as all-a-that.