Review: The Case of the Dragon-Bone Engine

The Case of the Dragon-Bone Engine by Galadriel Coffeen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've so often been disappointed by steampunk that I very nearly gave this five stars just for being competent.

It's really more magepunk, though there is some steam about; the dragon-bone engine of the title is an alternative to a steam engine, installed in a train (there are also some installed in early motor-cars). The female protagonist is competent and sensible, which is a nice contrast to the usual steampunk heroine, and the love interest for the low-key, slow-burn romance is a decent guy. They have realistic conflicts in their backstories and come across as real people living in a real city, not just cardboard cutouts in front of a painted backdrop.

The secondary-world setting has some intriguing features that are not part of the central mystery and are just how the world is for the characters. For instance, there are very few stars, which caught my interest and made me want to know more. It isn't all just out of the familiar box.

Deeply woven into the plot is the kind of entangled social and technological change that so often fails to be featured in steampunk (and, in my view, the genre is the poorer for the lack) - the kind of change that was such a feature of the real Victorian era. There's prejudice to combat; some of it is against the protagonist, who's the first female agent in a law-enforcement body, but that theme isn't beaten to death. Though she has to prove herself more because of her gender, her obvious competence means that it isn't a constant struggle. More prejudice exists against faeries, who are a small minority of the population, able to use magic, and seen as lazy and stupid and a threat by many of the human majority. This drives the plot in a satisfactory way. There are unscrupulous wealthy industrialists, wild-eyed revolutionaries, and decent people just trying to get on in the world. The police work is solid, the characters' personal stories mesh well into the plot, and overall it's a good piece of work. It's also (even in the pre-release version I had from Netgalley for review) better edited than most steampunk, or for that matter most SFF, that I've come across.

Though in the end I decided it wasn't quite all the way to the five-star level for me, I'm confident that the author will write five-star books in the future, and I very much want to read them.

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