I have a review of Chris and Jen Sugden's novel High Vaultage out in the most recent issue of Strange Horizons, which can be found here.
This book was a novelization of the audio fiction podcast Victoriocity, which both authors also wrote and (in the case of Chris Sugden) acted in. Set in an 1800s steampunk city known as "Even Greater London," the main story of High Vaultage follows an out-of-work police officer named Archibald Fleet, and an aspiring crime journalist named Clara Entwhistle. As the story begins, both of these characters have teamed up to found what they conceptualize as the world's first ever private detective agency, and have dedicated themselves to solving those mysteries which the authorities of Even Greater London have neglected to pursue. An excerpt from my review is below:
As a setting, Even Greater London is a creatively imagined world, with Fleet and Clara likewise representing grounded voices from which this absurd and oftentimes frightening realm can be perceived. This is a city in which, among many other things, a massive electrical tower has mysteriously plunged much of England into a perpetual ice age, where agents of the incomprehensibly complex Brunel corporation routinely demolish and rebuild entire neighborhoods without warning, and where Queen Victoria, after enduring numerous partially successful assassination attempts, has been transformed into a giant robot that now rules over the city as a “mechanical monarch.”
Unfortunately, while the setting of High Vaultage had a lot of potential for me, my eventual impression of this story was that it was built on a style of humor that distracted from the novel's strengths. Even Greater London is unique as a story setting, but much of the comedy of High Vaultage falls into a formulaic pattern in which the focus of this satire is not the book's creatively absurd world, but instead random and largely unrelated side characters with bizarre personality quirks that Fleet and Clara must endure as they conduct their investigations. The end result is that while the main story of High Vaultage follows Fleet and Clara as they work to uphold what they see as a sense of justice and humility in the face of the chaos produced by Even Greater London's bureaucracy, the individualistic nature of the humor that sits at the forefront of this story starts to feel cruel in a way that the book's authors neglect to examine.
The complete review which I wrote for Strange Horizons can be read on their site at this link.