In Ship of Magic, Robin Hobb introduced us to the Bingtown traders and their comfortable world, just at the point where it starts to fall apart, a process which accelerates in this second book of the Liveship Traders series. Slavery and slave trading have come into fashion, and the old trading alliance with the strangely disfigured colonists of the Rain Wilds is falling apart. Their distant overlords in Jamailla are making demands of tribute and a slavery hating pirate captain has ambitions of his own. Hobbs' characters are complex and usually attractive; her sense of the conflicts that arise between imperfect goods is sophisticated. Above all, she shows a capacity for sympathy in unlikely places--Kennit, the pirate who constantly tries to deny that he has a conscience; Althea, who will sacrifice almost everything to her desire to get back control of the family ship; the ships themselves, intelligent beings whose grace and charm hide the fact that they are the victims of a crime nonetheless gross for being inadvertent. Like the Assassin trilogy before it, the Liveship Traders books take us to a world of beauty and strangeness, where actions plausibly have terrible consequences. --Roz Kaveney