GYPSY VOLUME 3 & VOLUME 4

"THE DAY OF THE TSAR" | "DARK EYES"
Art by: Enrico Marini | Written by: Thierry Smolderen

Intrigue! If there was any one thing that the first couple volumes of GYPSY might have been missing -- and honestly, it's pretty hard to say they lacked for anything at all -- it would be intrigue. But now even that box is checked in the series' third book.

Volume 3 is set, as was volume 2, in Siberia, where our hero Tsagoi and his sister Bibi have hitched up with a group of Russian revolutionaries led by the young and newly crowned Tsar, Ivan -- who was rescued, along with his uncle, by Tsagoi in the prior installment. Ivan and Bibi fall in love, and the young man announces his plan to marry her after the revolution's opening volley. Tsagoi is roped into serving in the Tsar's army, and soon the battle is joined. Our heroes attack the castle of warlord Slomo, and after a bloody skirmish, he's overthrown. The Sorceress shows up during the fight with Tsagoi's hijacked truck and an arms shipment for Slomo, and reinforcements sent by the Selmer Corporation appear as well, via dirigible, but these new arrivals fail to turn the tide in Slomo's favor. His men are beaten, he is executed, and that night, Ivan and Bibi are wed.

And this is where the intrigue comes in. We learn in pretty quick order that Ivan does not possess Tsar's blood after all; he's a pawn used by his uncle in service of a shadowy organization called the White Wing -- and what's more the Sorceress is a member of that same organization. The Sorceress tries to kill Tsagoi, Ivan's uncle tries to kill Ivan, and all heck generally breaks loose. Eventually the bad guys are thwarted (though the Sorceress escapes), but Ivan confesses his common blood to the masses, and gets shot for his trouble. The newly widowed Bibi joins Tsagoi in his truck as they leave town, along with Big Ben, a former Selmer trucker turned ally in the aftermath of the revolution.

The biggest revelation in these pages, however, is that among the Tsar's forces is a highly competent soldier who just happens to be the long-missing heiress, Burma Selmer. She's spent the past several years hating her father for never coughing up ransom when she was kidnapped, but she's informed by Big Ben, a longtime friend of the family, that her dad died of grief days after the kidnapping, and it was Burma's treacherous cousin, Birgit, who not only didn't pay the ransom, but who didn't even tell anyone it was an option.

One stray thought on this book before we move along to the next one: in the first volume, we learned that Bibi is HIV-positive. In this book, she and Ivan hop into bed together on their wedding night to consummate their marriage. And at no point do we see her tell him about her condition...!

At this point, we skip ahead some undetermined amount of time. As volume 4 opens, Bibi is living in Los Angeles and writing a novel, and Tsagoi is back on the road. It's a bit of a jarring jump, considering the previous volume ended with certain unresolved plot points, such as the Burma/Birgit situation described above, as well as Birgit's lover, Sabrina, drifting away from Siberia in a zeppelin full of dead men. But none of that factors into the fourth book, which is pretty much a simple done-in-one adventure.

The book begins with a flashback to Tsagoi's youth, setting up his friendship with his older cousin, Mirno, and Mirno's girlfriend, Milena. We then jump twenty five years into the future, as adult Tsagoi meets up with Mirno and Milena, now married, in the Czech Republic. Mirno needs Tsagoi's help to smuggle something into Germany, so the two set off together. They pick up a paraplegic girl from the side of the road, get into fights with soccer hooligans at a couple of bars, and eventually find themselves tangled up with a pair of mob hitmen who are themselves assassinated by a mystery woman named Angel, working with the Sorceress on behalf of White Wing.

Eventually, Mirno makes his delivery, which turns out to be a shipment of human organs. But the package is received by undercover government agents, sending Mirno and Tsagoi on the run without Mirno's payoff. Tsagoi dumps his sleazy cousin by the roadside to fend for himself, then drives on.

This isn't a bad story -- in fact it's kind of funny in places, as our heroes drive through Germany on the night of a major soccer game, with everyone in the country too busy watching to deal with anything else -- but after the continued storyline of the first three books, this one feels a little inconsequential. The reference to White Wing helps to tie it in somewhat with previous stories, but that alone isn't enough to make it feel "important".

Now, it's possible the events of this story will play a part in the next volume, which, as it happens, is titled "White Wing" -- and if that's so, then this book retroactively become an integral part of the saga. But just now, on its own, tha's not the case -- and it should be noted that GYPSY was published over a number of years, with one book released every year to year-and-a-half -- so to have your readers wait that long for a story that basically feels like filler, and then wait that same amount of time again for the subsequent installment... well, I'm not sure I would've enjoyed had I been reading these as they were published.