The Affinity Bridge

In The Affinity Bridge George Mann has very cleverly blended two popular genre, the "gaslight" thriller and the "alternative history" into a very pleasing read. The story starts in the fog shrouded streets of Victorian Whitechapel but this is a rather different London. True the gaslights, the handsome cabs and the fogs as well as the top hats, titles and floorlength dresses that are the essential props of the Victorian murder mysteries that we love are all present, but so are steam driven cabs and trams, airships criss cross the skies and clockwork robots do the menial work in offices and well off households. The main characters are Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator to the Crown, and his assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes. Miss Hobbes is what is known as "fiesty" an essential characteristic in females in modern fiction. Sir Maurice and Veronica follow a convoluted trail through an airship crash and murder by a ghostly policeman leading to an arrogant industrialist and a mad scientist. A plague virus that turns people into flesh eating zombies and Sir Maurice's predilection for a drop of laudenam (shades of Sherlock) give this adventure a unique flavour. I liked it and look forward to the next Newbury and Hobbes investigation.