I would've given this a better rating if Scott Lynch hadn't set the bar so high with Lies of Locke Lamora. While this book goes back to the dual storyline/flashback style, neither story is interesting for most of the book. One of the storylines is focused on the Gentlemen Bastards putting on a play, the other on a love story. Neither had the typical intelligent heist-style of the previous two books. While I really liked the Sanza brothers in the first book, they were kind of annoying in this book. It is also hard to get emotionally attached to characters that you know are dead. Red Seas at least introduced solid characters, while this book introduced so many characters in both storylines, it was hard to develop an attachment to any of them. The ending contains a cliffhanger, but I still found it difficult to be interested in picking up the next book.