After finishing 'The Metatemporal Detective' I was in the mood for more tales of nefarious goings on in dank alleyways being solved by heroic detectives. I was also in the mood for something that had a little hint of the supernatural and it seemed that Catherine Webb's new book had it all there for me. Unfortunately it wasn't to be...
As fans will already know, Horatio Lyle is a man of science in the London of 1865. He is also an occasional special constable of the sort that is known to save the world from all sorts of menaces and 'The Doomsday Machine' sees him fight to save the magical Tseiqin (a race of people with green eyes) from an act of genocide...
I got this much from the blurb and the first couple of chapters, a crafty look at the last couple of pages shows that everyone appears to live happily ever after. I didn't read the big bit in between though.
Why's this? Well, I never got into Sherlock Holmes and 'The Doomsday Machine' seemed to be turning out to be much the same kind of thing (with added mystical bits). I'm not interested in a detective smugly explaining why he's right all the time and I'm certainly not after a gradual meander through suspects and clues leading up to a final conclusion. I'm after something a bit more (well, much more) snappy than that, especially now it's Christmas and I've got a lot more time to really get into what I'm reading. I want gunfights, car chases and cackling villains but I wasn't interested in seeing if I could get far enough to find any. The last thing I wanted to find was another 'pick pocket with a heart of gold' as Lyle's companion...
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot here to recommend this book to anyone who's either a fan of Webb or into this type of book. The subject matter wasn't interesting me so I stopped reading, simple as that ;o)
Lyle is neither smug nor right all the time
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