OverLondon by George PenneyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Many books claim to be in the tradition of Terry Pratchett; far fewer can back it up even partially. This one, I think, can, though of course, compared with the master's best work, it falls short. Then again, compared with his best work, his early work fell short as well.
The setting is an alternate-history Britain where the differences are intentionally absurd. "Floatstone" enables cities (and airships) to fly, including OverLondon, where we lay our scene. Ann Boleyn, rather than being executed, went mad, had Henry VIII executed instead, and declared herself a deity, breaking from the Catholic Church. This is mentioned as having been several centuries ago, but it's not clear exactly when we are; there are elements that feel Elizabethan, including doublets and the existence of a playwright named Wobblespeare who's obsessed with Verona, but there are other elements, like bowler hats and the general clockpunk aesthetic, that feel more Victorian. It didn't seem like the worldbuilding was intended to make much sense, so I won't ding it for the fact that, while printing (except of the Vengeful Queen's holy book) is forbidden - this is a plot point - "penny dreadfuls" still exist, a phenomenon that was only enabled by cheap printing. There also seem to be a lot more cathedrals in OverLondon than in real-life London, though we don't see any bishops. There are anthropomorphic animal people, just because that's amusing.
The book needs more editing, including for some basic things like punctuating a dialog tag as if it was a separate sentence and not preceding or following a term of address with a comma, as well as the increasingly common "may" when it should be "might" and a collection of mostly familiar vocabulary errors: tenants/tenets, reigns/reins, proscribe/prescribe, disenfranchised/disenchanted, produce/product, rifled/riffled, discrete/discreet. The authors occasionally put too many negatives in a sentence and end up reversing the obviously intended meaning, and don't always get apostrophe placement right. It's no worse than average, but needs a tidy-up. These are mostly things a lot of people get wrong, which accounts for the fact that none of the many people mentioned in the acknowledgements apparently spotted them.
The plot is a kind of farcical hard-boiled mystery; I say "hard-boiled" because there's quite a bit of violence directed at the investigators, they spend a lot of time in the mean streets, they're chronically short of money and they drink a lot (especially their leader). Also, (view spoiler).
Priests are exploding, and Captain Reign, a swashbuckling pirate who has just managed to save her life by signing up as a privateer, becomes a private ear or investigator to try to earn enough money to get her ship out of hock. Her ferret-girl cabin boy Flora and intellectually different bosun Sid assist, or do something that sometimes resembles assisting, as does a clever young artificer named Elias. I enjoyed the reluctant thugs, the grubby urchins, the sinister guild leaders, the Cry (the sole news medium, town criers who announce the news on the hour), the flamboyant villain, the scary nuns. It's a fun world, and although sometimes it's violence or squalor played for laughs, it never felt like dark comedy. I'm not sure what makes the difference; the overall light and zestful tone, I think, and the optimism the characters retain about life and human nature.
I would definitely read more in the series, and it makes it firmly into the Silver tier of my annual recommendations list.
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