Pagliassotti, Dru -- Clockwork Heart
As far as I'm concerned, this is bait to get romance readers hooked on
clear-quill SF/fantasy. Up-front Austenite plot -- young woman of no
particular birth meets two brothers, the blond charming flirtatious
aristrocratic one and the ironic prickly withdrawn
socially-out-of-favor one who wears black all the time. Behind that is
a startlingly well-drawn fantasy world, with many threads (Victorian
forms, weighty but not completely rigid caste system, fantasy-clockpunk
hacker geeks, nation-cities trying to manage advancing technology)
woven into a distinctive whole -- and still, I judge, plenty
accessible to the SF-naive reader. Also a tidy police procedural with
great action scenes. I think the ending is slightly weak (maybe the
author couldn't bear to make the obvious villain really villainous)
but I want her to write a lot more.
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