Oh dear, this was another book that I wanted to like, but didn't enjoy that much.
A young doctor who is just making a name for himself gets approached to join the secret Lazarus Club by none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel who is at the time completing work on the Great Eastern. the club is a sounding board for all the great minds of mid Victorian Britain. Members include the like of Babbage, Bazelgette and George Stephenson. at he same time horribly mutilated female corpses are being dragged out of the Thames. There are walk on performances from many luminaries of the age including Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale, although I do fear that the celebrity walk-ons are rather at the expense of developing his own characters.
To say any more more would spoil the story, but the problem I found with the book was that it changed direction to many times never sure whether it was going for a detective procedural, a thriller, horror or steampunk conclusion and somehow missing out on all of them. Pollard who is a university lecturer also has the tendency to lecture to his readers about various aspects of Mid Victorian Britain so that in some places the book reads like a school history text book when he refers to Mudlarks or George Cayley's flying machines for example. He also credits the villain with rather too much future knowledge of the American Civil War.
Still it is only first novel and the epilogue points to a sequel set in the American Civil War so I might be tempted to follow on the adventures of Pollards hero
27/06/09 @ 19:09