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    The Affinity Bridge: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation
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    The Affinity Bridge: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation
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    The Affinity Bridge: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation
    Ebook350 pages5 hours

    The Affinity Bridge: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation

    By George Mann

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London. Airships soar in the skies, whilst ground trains rumble through the streets. But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side. Queen Victoria is kept alive by a primitive life-support system while her agents Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, do battle with enemies of the crown, both physical and supernatural...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTitan Books
    Release dateJul 17, 2015
    ISBN9781783298280

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    Reviews for The Affinity Bridge

    3/5

    18 ratings55 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Lively story with some excellent characters. A little outrageous in the amount of derring-do demonstrated by the middle aged protagonist. Steed would have shown more restraint and left the dirty work to Mrs. Peel. Should be a fun series.
    • 3/5
      An airship disaster, a plague of zombies, vicious automata, and a Sherlock-Holmesian investigator with a smart-and-lovely young female assistant, all in 19th-century London...

      Not bad - it's reasonably well-done. I'd say it's better written than the last 'steampunk' book I read. However, I still got that feeling that the author was writing in certain elements (well, most of the elements) to cater to current trends rather than because of his personal and abiding passion for these things. I could be wrong - I don't know the guy - but that's the feeling I received. There's plenty of adventure, and violence - but it all seems a little bloodless. The plot structure is a fairly standard mystery.
    • 3/5
      George Mann's novel is crammed full of plot lines that could be interesting, unfortunately he lets himself down with characters that are hard to interact with. Sir Maurice Newbury is like a darker, blander Sherlock Holmes. Somehow he manages to create a character that should be interesting considering his constant drug use and knowledge of dark arts in Victorian London yet he turns out so bland it's almost unbearable. He does display great qualities but by the end of the book I found myself honestly not giving a damn as to whether he lives or dies. There is no personal attachment to any of the characters, nothing that makes them remotely human other than the painfully obvious. Victoria Hobbes is a little easier to like because of her ventures to her sisters asylum, although yet again her sister is pretty much one dimensional and only there as a plot device. The steampunk theme in the book is well executed, but the amount of idioms used to describe the different mechanisms sometimes became tiresome. Especially since sometimes, as much as I enjoy setting the appropriate tone for a scene, I just want get on with the story rather than reading in detail about fifty different small machines and how they work. Queen Victoria was the highlight of the book for me, and the end of the book came to a brilliant climax. The villians were fantastic in my view but a little short lived on whole in the plot. The zombie plot line feed nicely into the malfunctioning robots story. I will be buying the second one but purely for the end extract where Victoria and the Queen are conversing about Sir Maurice. Hopefully the plot will be less crammed, more even paced and have less grammatical errors.
    • 4/5
      Welcome in the English Empire of 1901. Victoria is still ruling and at first glance it looks like our very mundane English Empire. Except that there are airships and automatons that are able to carry any predefines tasks - from serving drinks to piloting the airships and copying texts.The Prologue is set in India where something that looks like a zombie makes a big mess from a few guys... and we never hear about them again. But it is not pointless - a few pages into the novel, it turns out that a plague is hunting London and it is basically turning people in living zombies. And everyone suspects that it had been carried from India.And although this is one of the most important sub-stories in the book, it is not in any way a horror/zombie novel. It's as away from it as it gets.A series of murders are happening in Whitechapel (where else?) and no one has any clue on what is going on except that a lot of witnesses talking about a blue glowing policeman. Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant Veronica Hobbes are called to try to help. Sir Maurice is working at a museum but he is also an agent for the Crown. And just when you are setting for a nice murder mystery, an airship crashes and the Queen sends Newbury to investigate. Somewhere around this time, the brother of Miss Coulthard (Newbury's secretary) disappears. Add the plague and the London fog (which in some parts of the novel is the main character) and the setting for the novel is there.Scotland Yard keeps looking for the murderers, Newbury and Hobbes try to investigate the crashing, and Jack is still missing. And at one point both investigations cross and everyone figure out that there is some connection between both (I would have been surprised if there was none).And then starts the big action and Newbury turns into a real James Bond-like agent going from one fight to another and from one danger to another. He almost dies a few times, makes quite a lot of spectacular things (including managing to crash safely one of the airships even though he had never been on one before, let alone piloting it). All ends well (for most of the involved at least). And in case you expect that Veronica is just sitting around, you would be surprised. I cannot judge how realistic were the fight scenes but they sounded logical and were enjoyable to be read.The mysteries get resolved smoothly without any jumps so it was very nice following what was happening. No dirty tricks like someone having a genius idea that just works or having a major property of the world not explained beforehand. 4/5th into the book most of the mysteries had been solved and the last part of the book is dedicated to bringing the bad guys to justice and resolving a few smaller story lines. Except the one for Jack who just turns up at a place where Veronica can find him with lost memory and no explanation what had happened to him.The world building is nice – it is building over the real London, changing only the needed pieces. It feels real. The science and medical explanations are not overdone and the parts that are needed are in the proper places to ensure that you know what’s going on without breaking the line of the novel. The way the narrative is flowing is a bit dated but is working great for the novel… I am not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if there were not the long and flowery sentences explaining the state of mind of the people during the Victorian era. Tying everything together is a bit rushed in a few places and a few meetings and events are happening a bit too comfortably just when they are needed but at the same time none of them feels as a patch which was just added there to make sure that the narrative flows properly.And then there is the Epilogue. You would expect that it will close all the remaining stories and will get our heroes back to their every day life. But this happens in the last chapters and I really hoped that it won’t ruin the novel. And in the same way in which the Prologue is part of the story, the Epilogue closes the story in an unexpected way showing a few of the proceedings in a new perspective and explaining a few things that were just looking a bit odd if we consider the way the things had been looking like in 1901. If it had happened earlier, I would not have been surprised by certain actions and the novel would have lost from it. So it was a great decision to send this at the end of the story…The few weak points:1. While Newbury was fighting with the creatures close to the carriage, one of them died again. Well - in most cases zombies are really dead before they turn zombies but this novel makes the point a few times that people get in this poor state before dying. A slip of the writer/editor I guess.2. The disappearance of Jack is left out of the whole story. It looks pointless and the closing is less than satisfactory. I hope it will play some role in later stories because in this one it was just staying as a patch.3. During most of the story Veronica seemed to hide that she is going to the asylum and why. She did not even want to explain what she meant with the words 'All is in their heads'. And yet near the end, Newbury not only knew but Veronica did not even reacted surprised when he asked about the patient and promised his help...The amusing things:1. When Newbury and Veronica went to the crashing site, he was explaining to her that such things happen and the latest one he knows about had been in Bulgaria. It might not be amusing for everyone but I live in Bulgaria. :)2. Programs that cannot malfunction. I actually laughed at it. Except that this turned out to be true.As a whole I liked the novel. It had its bad parts and slow moments but I could not stop reading until it ended. It was engaging and entertaining. And it was a perfect read for a lazy weekend.I will be waiting for the sequel this year :)
    • 3/5
      Ich befürchte, mit dieser Art von Steampunk kann ich nicht viel anfangen. Ich fand das Setting anstrengend, die Aufklärung des Falles langweilig umgesetzt und die teilweise unnötigen Actionszenen nervig. Werde den zweiten Teil trotzdem lesen, da er nun mal hier rumliegt und die Hoffnung besteht, dass die Geschichte weniger schleppend ist, nachdem die Protagonisten nicht mehr vorgestellt werden müssen.
    • 4/5
      Hooray for another duo of detectives figuring out what the hell is going on in a steampunky Victorian London! I enjoyed the story more than I thought. The whole is quite slow and the descriptions Mann makes of the world are positively chilling, which was a change of pace from your usual action-packed adventure. There's a nice, though not amazing, heroine in this, who is given some worthy moments and a pretty interesting use of science overall, Mann does a good job at explaining his world, I was riveted.
      Overall, not an earth-shattering book but still well above average.
    • 5/5
      I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but this book is BRILLIANT! The female character is sympathetic, the male character is flawed, but in an undertstandable way. There are shades of Alan Moore's "From Hell" lurking about creating dark, atmospheric pockets. The zombies are spine chilling and extraordinarily well conceived. I cannot wait for the next book. Literally. I can't wait. I may explode. It could happen. So, just wanted to point all that out. I'll try to be sane again now.
    • 4/5
      I love it when two of my favorite genres - Victorian murder mystery and steampunk - come together in a story. It is November 1901. Sir Maurice Newbury is an experienced anthropologist with the British Museum. He is also an agent of the Queen. He is good friends with Sir Charles Bainbridge, a chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. Sir Maurice also has a new assistant that the Museum, Miss Veronica Hobbes. Newbury and his assistant Hobbes are called to investigate the wreckage of a crashed airship and its missing automaton pilot, and attempt to solve a string of strangulation attributed to a mysterious blue glowing policeman while dealing with the revenant plague - aka zombies- that are ravaging the slums, including Whitechapel, of London.It is possible that I will not amuse a number of individuals when I state that I feel that this book should be classified as a 'cozy steampunk mystery". It has all the trappings, setting, characters and overall atmosphere of a cozy Victorian set murder mystery series. In particular, It really has all I have come to enjoy in Charles Finch's Charles Lennox murder mystery series with the added accoutrements of the steampunk genre - airships, automatons - and the addition of zombies in the form of plague revenant victims. The main characters are charming, society class individuals with personalities of their own and the murder mystery is one that is easy to settle into. Not a page turner, and not, IMO, a 'engaging melodrama' as billed, but more of a fun, comfort read. I will say this, you really have to follow the story to its conclusion to see how all the pieces tie together.I would recommend this book as a good primer for anyone who enjoys Victorian murder mysteries as a launching pad into the world of steampunk, to find out what all the excitement is about, and to test the waters to see if steampunk is something they might want to delve into further.The Affinity Bridge is book one in what is so far a three book series - my local library only recently acquired book one - and I do look forward to following the further adventures of Newbury and Hobbes.
    • 3/5
      Fun and harmless. Not sure I will read another in this series, although I must admit that by the end of the book, I was at least a little invested in the characters. Felt like the author was trying a bit too hard sometimes.
    • 4/5
      The world of Victorian London is full of dark and mysterious activities, such as the strange plague that rots the body and forces the sufferer to crave human flesh has rattled the nerves of folks in the poorer districts. Meanwhile, sightings of a spectral, glowing policeman who strangles random people has Sir Maurice Newbury -- an agent for the Queen and specializing in the supernatural -- scrambling to find the culprit. In the midst of it all, a dirigible known as 'The Lady Armitage' crashes into Finsbury Park and bursts into flames. Normally, Scotland Yard would handle the investigation, but the Queen has a keen family interest in discovering what happened, so she chanres Sir Maurice and his new assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, to scour the wreckage for clues.Combing the skeletal airship, they come across a group of crash victims restrained to their chairs so that they could not leave. Heading toward the front of the ship, they are unable to locate the pilot of the ship: no body, no skeleton, nothing to indicate that anyone had been steering the airship. Outside the wreckage, the meet with a Mr. Stokes a representative from Chapman and Villiers, one of the leading air transportation services in the country, and that hey had recently begun to use automatons to pilot their airships. Stokes assures Newbury and Hobbes that the automaton could not have malfunctioned. However, the duo sets out on their own investigation to find the missing pilot, and in the process, uncover the dark secret behind the automatons and a possible connection to the glowing policeman."The Affinity Bridge" spins a fun mystery/adventure tale set within the steampunk world of Victorian London. Electric lights, steam-powered airships, zombies, mechanical men -- what a world to explore, and yet author George Mann manages to keep things firmly within the Victorian world. One of my favorite examples of this is Miss Hobbes preferring to use a regular horse and carriage rather than one of those noisy, mechanical contraptions being controlled by drivers who still aren't too comfortable with the technology. Plus, his characters are all well-written and strong, from the unflappable Miss Hobbes (who has dark familial secrets) and the technologically-enthused Sir Maurice to the squirrely and smarmy Mr. Stokes and the unemotional and determined Pierre Villiers -- the creator of the automatons.My only fault with the novel is the side story of John Coulthard. Introduced in the prologue while serving in the war in India, his character disappears almost immediately after that. His sister happens to be Sir Maurice's receptionist, but the search for him and the reason behind his disappearance don't affect the main story in any way and doesn't have any relevance to it.But that is very minor in relation to the rest of the book. "The Affinity Bridge" is a great mixture of mystery and steampunk -- a fun read that I definitely enjoyed.
    • 3/5
      Reads like the classic Doctor Who episode "Talons of Weng-Chiang" meets Sherlock Holmes. Wait, isn't that almost redundant somehow? :) In any case, a pleasant steampunk romp - even given the presence of zombies in the streets of London!
    • 3/5
      An easy-reading swashbuckle through an alternate turn-of-the-century London. With a zombie plague raging and a mysterious serial killer throttling their way through the misty streets of Whitechapel, Her Majesty's agent Sir Maurice Newbury and his new assistant Veronica Hobbes have enough on his hands - until an automaton-crewed airship crashes without explanation, killing a royal relative. Introducing Mann's vision of steampunk London and a likeable investigative duo (although ye gods the romantic references are heavy-handed), The Affinity Bridge is chockful of entertaining ideas and will divert on a slow afternoon. Sadly Mann seems as uncomfortable with his female characters as his protagonist is (poor Veronica cannot be described without reference to her appearance) and is even more awkward when it comes to describing combat (the grand finale is actually painful to read - terrible choreography, and a big ask in terms of suspension of disbelief). Still, these are fairly minor gripes - overall the novel is inoffensive if not entirely inspiring.
    • 4/5
      A 'glowing policeman,' perhaps a ghost, kills in Whitechapel, baffling police - an airship crashes and kills all passengers, apparently with no explanation - revenants prowling the streets pass on the plague that infects them, making the foggy streets of London dangerous. Sir Maurice Newbury, in the service of Queen Victoria herself, is on these cases, tackling them with the help of his assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, and his good friend the police commissioner, Sir Charles Bainbridge.This is my latest read in the exploration of the Steampunk genre, and I can see how its alternate technology and Victorian setting fit into the parameters. I had trouble getting into the story at the beginning, but I'm glad I persevered. I think it was more me than the actual story, because the pacing built well over the course of the story, until it was strumming along at the end when I just had to keep going and find out how everything fit together. Newbury and Miss Hobbes are interesting characters, and I enjoyed their conversations and growing respect for one another. I would certainly consider reading more of their adventures.
    • 4/5
      Sir Maurice Newbury is not the mild-mannered academic he seems. Or, rather, he IS…but he is also secretly an agent of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. He uses his special expertise in anthropological studies—with a concentration in mythology, magic, and the supernatural—to solve the otherwise unsolvable mysteries plaguing London and the environs. While investigating a series of deaths that onlookers have laid at the feet of a blue-glowing policeman, Newbury is called away by royal decree to focus his attentions on the mysterious crash of an airship that resulted in the deaths of all aboard. When Newbury and his assistant, the plucky young Miss Veronica Hobbes, arrive at the scene, they discover that the pilot of the airship is missing! Further investigation reveals that the ship had been piloted by a new breed of automata, supposedly infallible and failure-proof. Newbury is not so certain about that, and infallible or not, no one has a reasonable explanation for the automata’s disappearance. The pair’s investigations begin to reveal strange connections between the glowing policeman murders, the missing automata, and the plague of undeath ravaging the city’s slums. Exciting and original, if somewhat marred by slightly clunky expositions and a tendency toward anachronistic slang, “The Affinity Bridge” is a worthy first in a new series of steampunk Victorian mysteries.
    • 3/5
      The author is far better at writing places than characters, and, rather jarringly, the opening scene in India is undoubtedly the best part of the book (and suitably horrific). The settings are well drawn, and there's something pleasingly eerie in the Queen and her coterie and the Revenants.The plot doesn't cheat and hide information from the reader so it's possible to work up who/how/why-done-it at the same time or before the protagonists. It's also unconvoluted and well-thought out.The problem is the characters and the dialogue. It just doesn't quite work, there's a few anachronisms too many, I think, and Sir Maurice Newby is a textbook Marty Stu, and not in a nod-and-a-wink way. People take improbable amounts of damage towards the end of the book, and it totally threw out my ability to suspend my disbelief.That being said, I'm buying the next one, because of the cover, because of the setting and because of the thing at the end (that I shall say no more about).
    • 5/5
      This book was fast paced and a page turner. I can easily imagine this book being a movie. I loved the setting, Mann wrote London to be a character. The characters and plot were very engaging. Great stuff.
    • 4/5
      Product DescriptionWelcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by unfamiliar inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, while ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen, and journalists.But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side.Queen Victoria is kept alive by a primitive life-support system, while her agents, Sir Maurice Newbury and his delectable assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes, do battle with enemies of the crown, physical and supernatural. This time Newbury and Hobbes are called to investigate the wreckage of a crashed airship and its missing automaton pilot, while attempting to solve a string of strangulations attributed to a mysterious glowing policeman, and dealing with a zombie plague that is ravaging the slums of the capital.Good opening to a new series. The two mysteries that Newbury is investigating zip along, but both Newbury and Hobbes felt a little flat. Hopefully Mann fleshes both of them out a little more in the following books. Definitely worth reading and highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Steampunk is all the rage right now. And Mann did not leave me disappointed at all with his take on it. Introducing Newbury (the detective) and Miss Hobbes (his assistant), this book delves into a world where airships float gracefully through the sky, where zombies stalk the dark street corners, where automatons appear to the be the new frontier.I loved this book. That is not an exaggeration in the least. Mann definitely knows what he's doing. He has great character development and the plot-line is incredibly captivating. I don't think I've read a book that has incorporated all the true elements of the Steampunk genre as Mann has. This is truly a work of art!
    • 4/5
      The year is 1901. A strange zombie plague threatens the low class areas of London. Zeppelins fill the skies, piloted by mechanical men. Queen Victoria, with medical help, is still on the British Throne. A mysterious, glowing policeman has been strangling people. Welcome to the world of George Mann's The Affinity Bridge.In this Victorian AH Steampunk world, meet Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes. Agents of the Crown, its their job to deal with enemies and threats to England. And do it proper British style, of course.Its clear that there are dark things afoot. A mysterious zeppelin crash impels our two agents into a world of conspiracy, adventure, intrigue and even a bit of the New Weird. The book is not as aggressively set in that genre as other novels I have read as of late; The Affinity Bridge is much more a pure AH "steampunk novel"--with some twists. The novel starts slowly as we start to get to know the characters. It's clear Newbury and Hobbes are relatively new to each other, as they are to us. However, the writing and characterization improve as we get to know Newbury, Hobbes, and the characters around them.When it does hit on all cylinders, the novel feels a lot like those old Victorian novels, with all of the plots tying together in a neat fashion (perhaps too neat), hair-breadth escapes, and even a couple of pitched battles, and always time for British sensibility. The characters are neither cardboard nor two dimensional--both have flaws and aspects of their characters that they keep under wraps.The tagline to this book is "A Newbury and Hobbes novel" which sounds to me that a sequel might be in the offing. Now that the characters and world are firmly established by the end of the Affinity Bridge, I'd read it.
    • 3/5
      Slow starting Victorian steampunk mystery. Kind of obvious but felt like it was just setting the scene for more books to follow. Diverting enough.
    • 3/5
      Rather a straightforward British mystery/action novel, steampunk-flavored with a twinge of sociology but, frankly, nothing very interesting.I suspect it would appeal more to mystery genre fans.
    • 3/5
      A steampunk potboiler, pleasantly diverting, though despite being set in a Victorian world of airships, automatons, and flesh-eating "revenants," is as cliched as a 1940s movie serial. The hero is Indiana Jones in a bowler, his assistant an "independent" young woman for her time who secretly swoons for her boss. The villains have no redeeming qualities, and there are cinematic chases over rooftops, atop a speeding "road train," and in a runaway airship. In rapid succession, there was probably one chase too many. And since this was the kind of book where you knew the heroes weren't going to die, well . . .

      It kept me flipping the pages, but now that I've had dessert, I'm going to choose something more substantive the next time.
    • 4/5
      this is the first Steampunk I've read, I really did enjoy it and will be looking for other books similar, The story itself was almost a simple version of a Sherlock Holmes feeling, then it changed and became its own genre. IndianaJones, lovers may enjoy this.
    • 4/5
      I rather liked it. Sort of a slightly pulpy page-turner that owes a lot to Sherlock Holmes, and it didn't really need zombies. Also, toward the end, the book is packed with action sequences, almost as if the author suddenly realized that the book was short a few.

      Oddly enough, it was very small things that cracked my suspension of disbelief. For example, one of the automata is represented as typing "ten times the speed of a human." Typing speed around 1900 was down around 40 wpm on the Underwood uprights... ten times that is 400 wpm... I suspect that those old typewriters would not have ALLOWED such a high rate but would have jammed up pretty quickly.

      But I did appreciate the emancipated female character and the light touch on the use of airships. I'll read another.
    • 3/5
      This is another book in a line of steampunk reads lately that was somewhat disappointing to me. This was an okay read and technically steampunk; although mainly this is a pretty standard mystery type of story. The characters were fairly bland and I felt the writing style itself was a bit devoid of personality. Nothing about this book really grabbed me and sucked me in.At times I felt like the author had a checklist of steampunk elements he had to include to make this more steampunky: airships...check, zombies...check, cool weaponized cane...check, laudanum...check, etc. etc. While it contained a lot of steampunk elements that story actually wasn’t very steampunk in feel or philosophy. There are a lot of very standard ideas in here and it made for a book that just wasn’t very unique or exciting...and at times was just plain boring.I was disappointed in the characters as well. I had high hopes when Hobbes entered the picture; she was smart, tough...and ended up being absolutely thin as a character throughout. The best scenes in here are between her and her sister. She just didn’t have enough dimension and wasn’t engaging enough. Newbury, our supposed hero, was supposed to be very Sherlock-like but he missed glaringly obvious clues throughout which was frustrating. Then somehow, despite his injuries, towards the end of the book he gained almost superhuman abilities...I mean really he didn’t...but the way he functioned while injured was completely unrealistic and worthy of a solid eye-roll.Overall this was another disappointing steampunk read for me. I absolutely love this genre but I have been struggling lately to find anything decent written in it. I have a few more steampunk series on my shelves to try out so hopefully I will find something good soon. Not recommended and I won’t be reading more of the series.
    • 5/5
      This story takes place in a Victorian London which on one level is well known to all of us. The author of this book has however changed and adapted it for our enjoyment. Airships fly over the city,Ground trains compete with Hansom cabs for business and Automatons serve as pilots and servants to the rich.At the same time,there are a series of murders committed by a strange glowing figure and a plague of zombie-like creatures infecting the city.Shortly after the book begins,we are introduced to investigator and royal agent,Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes. They are sent by Queen Victoria to investigate the mysterious crash of one of the fleet of airships, on which there was a total loss of life.I have to declare that 'steampunk',which I am led to believe is what this book would be described as,is a completely new sub-genre to me. It is all the more power to George Mann therefore,that I can say that I really enjoyed it,and look forward to the next 'Newbury & Hobbes' thrilling adventure with keen anticipation.
    • 4/5

      Seven out of ten.

      In a very different Victorian London, full of clattering ground-trains, airships and clockwork automatons, a series of murders and tales of cadavers rising from the dead force the queens office, Newbury to investigate. Action packed and fast paced. Quite similar in style to Harry Potter.

    • 3/5
      There were some admirable qualities in the Affinity Bridge. But it fell short of a five star review.It is a mystery, set in a steampunk Victorian era. Late Victorian for Queen Victoria died in January of 1901 and this is later in the year.There are Zombies, so right there, big strike against the book. IMHO there are too many incidents of Zombie fiction that has been unoriginal lately, though Mann does use it as a plot device.That we have a Holmes like investigator is not a perfect claim. Holmes is better than Sir Maurice Newbury. Newbury has his quirks. He draws pentagrams on his floor. But I did not see any result or reason for him to have done so. That was where Mann man have missed the boat. He had a chance to make Sir Maurice bigger. He didn't.He had some Steampunk gadgetry, and this gave us a world where we have Hansom Cabs becoming mechanical. But the day to day gadgetry did not really seem to exist. Only a few big things, like the train, the airship. Then we had a long, really long fight sequence that you will have seen in movies as men jostle atop a train. Yet it was so long that a good tenth of the book seemed to be eaten away. For something that did not add to the drama and became implausible as well.There is the heart of it. Sir Maurice was already wounded and having a terrible (and boringly long) fight on top of a train car that was driving about the streets of London (So how fast could it really go?) and he was able to win. No, Mann had the makings of a mystery, but then he also let us down with no deductive reasoning at the crime scene. An airship crashes and the investigation is rather childish. Need to read Crichton's Airframe, there is a lot that goes on when a major disaster occurs.In the end, the world needed more to be Steampunk (and if the Queen dies, she dies. Easy enough to change your date to 1900), it needed a better investigator, and when a man is wounded, he only has so much he can endure.There just does not seem a need to find out any more in the world of Newbury and Hobbes.
    • 4/5
      Some steampunk books lean more towards certain genres than others--this one is, at heart, a mystery novel with a steampunk London setting. It's a bit stiff in some regards, and it does contain many cliches of the genre (historical steampunk does have an odd affinity for zombies). However, I found it to be a delightful romp of a read, flaws and all. I enjoyed the subtle chemistry between Sir Maurice and Veronica and how Veronica is a true lady of her time period yet still has plenty of spunk. I admit, the scenes with Veronica's sister were fascinating in a way that tended to steal the glory of the rest of the plot; I can only hope that relationship is explored more in future books. I would really like to read on in this series.
    • 2/5
      I wanted to like this, I love the idea of it, but did not find the story engaging.