I accidentally read book 4 of this series (The Secret of Abdu El Yezadi) before book 1, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, so my perspective here may be a little out of whack, but oh well. I think a lot of things meant to be surprises or reveals were not because I’d already seen the results. Burton complains briefly of feeling disconnected, and the reason for that gets fully disclosed in the 4th book, so I guess I missed wondering about that too, […]
Chess, Blades, and Now I wait
I liked Stiletto. It had a lot of the great elements from The Rook, with a few new ones. There was action, supernatural weirdness, and snark aplenty. The Checquy and The Grafters are in the middle of negotiating their merge and of course things go wrong and get complicated. Much of the story focuses on 2 new characters, one from each side: Pawn Felicity Clements, and Odette Leliefeld, descendent of the founder of the Grafters. The perspective switches back and forth between the two, which […]
Squeeeee!
Ale totally nailed this! Yay for Book Exchange ?
Fantastic Historical Fiction
Confession: I picked up this book not realizing it was volume 4 of a series. It still mostly made sense though, and I didn’t figure out it wasn’t book 1 until the end. It’s historical fiction, set in Victorian England, as Richard Francis Burton returns home from discovering the source of the Nile, but then it goes steampunk with time travel, spirits, vampires, etc. There’s a lot of real life historical people in this story, and thankfully there’s an appendix with the specifics at the […]