![]() ![]() ![]() Steam-London is a city of sky-scrapers, the tops of the swaying buildings held in place by helium-filled balloon-like sky-anchors. Thus the city hisses with myriad "cognoggin" gadgets of every size and purpose, including self-propelled Refuse-Agitators and Night-Illuminators, steam-powered lifts and trolleys, mechanized Tome-Selectors and corset removers, Steam-Stream guns and finger-sized steam throwers, and clockwork hairclips and dragonfly pins. ![]() ![]() The story is set in a steampunk 1889 London, for Parliament has passed an act banning electricity and promoting steam power. And the girls quickly find themselves investigating a deadly scheme to bring the Egyptian goddess of death Sekhmet back to life. What a promising premise to Colleen Gleason's first "Stoker and Holmes" novel, The Clockwork Scarab (2013)! Irene Adler, AKA "the woman," the American opera singer who got the best of Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and is now the keeper of British Museum antiquities, recruits Alvermina (Mina) Holmes, the great detective's niece, and Evaline Stoker, Bram Stoker's younger sister, to be secret agent/detectives discretely risking "life and limb for their queen, their countrymen, and the Empire," just as many young men but no other young women do. ![]()
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