This was without a doubt, one of the worst and most excruciating books I've ever read. I'll level with you, I've read books before that I have not enjoyed, felt dispassionately about or didn't think they deserved to be classics... but this book sucked. The writing was bad. The cliches were not cute or fitting, they were annoying. The characters were poorly written, had dubious if even present motivations and the female characters were entirely token. The reason I'm so mad about it is because I'm a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen and anything with a supernatural taint. Naturally, steampunk is a concept I'm curious about but I've only ever read one novel you could classify that way. I enjoyed that one. This one, not so much.
Here's the blurb I read when I was considering if I should buy this for my Kindle, as the series was maybe eight dollars... "As fog descends, obscuring the gas lamps of Victorian London, werewolves prowl the shadows of back alleys. But they have infiltrated the inner circles of upper-crust society as well. Only a handful of specially gifted practitioners are equipped to battle the beasts. Among them are the roguish Simon Archer, who conceals his powers as a spell-casting scribe behind the smooth veneer of a dashing playboy; his layabout mentor, Nick Barker, who prefers a good pub to thrilling heroics; and the self-possessed alchemist Kate Anstruther, who is equally at home in a ballroom as she is on a battlefield." Sounds kind of cool, right? The werewolves have a tenuous hold in high society and end up being portrayed as blood thirsty beast with no actual goal? The story line is pretty vague here, as nothing other than magic and werewolves are ever mentioned up until the point that they introduce homunculi. Inexplicably, they are poorly explained as genetically spliced human beings who have been enhanced with a skill in the vein of however they died - some have spikes, some secrete acid, some are partially mechanical... This appeared to me as a plot device to make a very simple concept into something more than the author could actually achieve. It was done badly, felt forced, and didn't seem to have had a purpose after the main plot point was "solved".
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