Phoenix Rising by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris
A very refreshing novel featuring Steampunk themes and incredibly poetic writing. The authors are able to seamlessly blend late nineteenth century vocabulary with modern to create a very reader friendly story with the language expected from Dickens and Austen but the brevity of modern sentence structure. Set during Queen Victoria's reign Agent Wellington Books and Agent Eliza Braun are the unlikely partners who discover the nefarious actions of the underground Phoenix Society which has steered every major political change within the British Empire since the Romans. The relationship between Books and Braun is tense and occasionally hostile
since Agent Braun was reassigned from active fieldwork to the Archives
under the supervision of Agent Books the Ministry of Peculiar
Occurrences' methodical and uptight Archivist. Although their initial investigation surrounds the gruesome deaths of factory workers that were originally investigated by Miss Braun and her former partner, whose untimely descent into madness halted the case, the connection between the Phoenix Society and the murders soon crop up. The mixture of strict Victorian expectations and fanciful technology give this novel something very unique and exciting in its structure and plot. I can't wait to find a sequel or similar novels.
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