Read courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. It’s out now.

This is a sequel to The Knife and the Serpent, although it’s not entirely necessary to have read that first; the narrator provides a “previously on” recap so you know what the state of play is: that the narrator is Glenn, except when she’s Gwen; he is dating Vivy, who is from another multiverse; Glenn is himself learning to be an agent, along with Vivy, for a group called the Interventionists; that Vivy is the domme to Gwen/Glenn’s sub; that Vivy’s spaceship, The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie, is a bit of an ass and sometimes gets around in an android body.

With that knowledge, you can go into the novel fairly easily, because while another character from the first novel does reappear here, their personality is explained well enough and their actions aren’t really related to anything important previously.

With the understanding that the novel’s universe is part of a multiverse, and that there are bits of the multiverse that can’t be accessed by humans or human-like creatures, the novel wonders what happens when there’s an incursion from outside the bit that functions like the universe we understand. And then somehow that piece of incursion attaches itself to a spectacularly amoral character. The answer, obviously, is Bad Things, and potentially Very Bad Things. Vivy, and then Glenn/Gwen, get pulled into the efforts to figure out what is going on, and what to do about it.

So there’s a lot of action, and some discussion about how places/ planets should govern themselves, and when/whether intervention is necessary. There’s also a lot about the people involved, and especially Gwen/Glenn, who is still working through their personal gender presentation preferences as well as working on their relationship with Vivy. (It should be noted that if you’re uncomfortable with the discussion of kink, this is not the book for you.)

Overall, this is a fairly lighthearted romp; there are serious issues and problems to resolve, but the overall tone is one of cheerful mayhem. There’s never any real doubt about whether a solution can be found – although the actual solutions were different enough that it was an enjoyable read.