Review: The Clockwork Detective

The Clockwork Detective by R.A. McCandless
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy a young female protagonist, and even though this particular young female protagonist might as well be a man for most purposes, she's determined, competent, perceptive, and an excellent negotiator who thinks well in a dangerous situation - things we're shown rather than told, to the author's credit.

There's a mystery plot, which played out well, but also an underlying political plot which is part of a larger series arc. There are tense confrontations and powerful moments of action and magic.

The setting is steampunk, but with a strong magical component from the Fae; there's the usual lighter-than-hydrogen gas for the airships, clockwork where clockwork doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense (in a prosthetic leg), and the rest of the steampunk trappings that you just have to take a deep breath and swallow.

The protagonist serves a somewhat corrupt and potentially dystopian empire, something that I hope will lead to more conflicts later in the series.

I read a pre-release copy from Netgalley, which needed an awful lot of copy editing work, even more than average for steampunk (which is typically a lot); I hope it gets it, though inevitably even a really good copy editor will still miss things. For an author who boasts of two decades of experience and a degree in communication and creative writing, the punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary errors are extraordinarily numerous.

Leaving that aside, I enjoyed it as a story, and would consider reading another in the series, though I'd probably want to read it after it had been thoroughly edited rather than before.

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