Author: Elizabeth Watasin
Publisher: A-Girl Studio
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This is a very odd tale set in Victorian London. It’s the first of a series, of course, because one volume is never enough these days. Indeed, writers seem so desperate to establish a money-spinning chain, that novels are becoming increasingly shorter because what used to be one full-length novel is now split and issued as a series of episodes. Such is this one. There is no real conclusion to this novel - you have to buy the next one to find out what's going on.
The two main characters are Art (short for Artifice), who is a resurrected and statuesque woman with nicely-defined musculature and impressive fighting skills - and Jim - a sentient skull. They are special agents in a police force which combats supernatural entities, and which is known as the Secret Commission.
Despite the impressive credentials of the main female character - normally ones which I would admire and to which I;d warm quickly, I really could not get into this story. It’s really short - less than ninety pages, and though it’s technically well written (I didn’t see any faux pas, grammatical gaffs, or spelling screw-ups, nothing really seems to happen in it. The story is rather plodding, and the thrust of the plot is entirely unclear. It's also confusing. I constantly felt like I was coming into a series in progress rather than into the beginning of a new story.
Art is a Quaker (or was a Quaker) so she's constantly saying grammatically nonsensical things along the lines of "Thee art correct" which was intensely irritating and seemed to serve no purpose other than to give her a quirk, which she clearly did not need, given how impressive she was already. Art was smart, strong in more than one way, she was self-possessed and independent, she healed quickly, and she was an astonishing fighter. She could be corporeal and very much a regular human when she wanted to be, which she nearly always was, but she could also go into some sort of 'ghost form' and move through walls. Trust me, she needed neither quirks nor affectations. The problem is that she was woefully wasted in this novel.
So what was the story about? Well that's impossible to say! Even having read it I can’t tell you! There are one or two bizarre murders, there's an investigation conducted by the main characters, and there are some weird things happening, such as zombie, arm-biting children, but there didn’t seem to be a real story here, nor any logical progression towards any sort of dénouement, which was disappointing to say the least. There were constant hints of something better, something exciting, something more intriguing to come, but it never actually arrived.
So, in short, this novel interested me because it seemed like it had amazing potential, only for me to see that potential quickly squandered. The story simply could not recover from that. What a sin, Elizabeth!
