Review: Dr. Who meets Wild, Wild West.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2012
April Malone is a progressive young woman in the Boston of 1890. She has a job and takes her boots off at work and has even learned to ride a velocipede. Her job is doing a lot of aimless things in an empty office for a boss who is never there.But people are disappearing into the dense Boston fog, and, then, a long-closed door in the empty office opens and a young man stumbles out asking if he's met April before and making a lot of disjointed comments, including the fact that his name is "Smith, not "Mr. Smith," just "Smith." And it turns out that he doesn't look any older than he did 30 years before when he had his picture taken with President Lincoln.But there is a mystery to be solved, and the Boston police to be coopted, and a story about a very angry sea monster, and a mysterious doctor who seems intent on getting his hands on "Smith."The story zips along at a break-neck pace.  The characters were pleasant to deal with but anachronistically modern.  The "reveals" in the story were tantalizing enough to make me want to read the next book to get more of the backstory on "Smith" and how and why he stumbles out of his locked room every few decades with a scattered memory, a mission to solve and a lot of temporally inappropriate but very neat gadgets.The book also tantalizes with its ending, where it gestures at the existence of a mysterious counter-organization with its own mad science skills.It was fun, easy book to read.  It kept my interest. It didn't disappoint.For that I give it 5 stars.