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New Amsterdam is a collection of short stories about Detective Crown Inspector Abigail Irene Garrett, a forensic sorceress, and Sebastien de Ulloa, a renowned amateur sleuth who also happens to be a vampire. The stories take place in an alternate history colonies, where tensions exist between the Empire, the French, and the Iroquois The first story in the collection owes much to the tradition of English country house mysteries, only the suspects are all trapped in a dirigble instead. The writing...
Alright, I know it's good. Before it falls into steampunk cliches, it really is good and fresh (and this might be a good moment to mention that I despise the soft, devoid of meaning and social context, overabundant in clockwork and corsets thing that has become of steampunk). I was offered two delightful, intriguing, and original characters, and stylish mysteries, all wrapped up in pretty prose. But I couldn't connect to the stories emotionally - maybe because of their length, they felt too shor...
A collection of short stories mostly written for anthologies. This felt a little like Kim Newman meets a Mercedes Lackey 'Elemental Masters' novel.A vampire detective and associates solve various crimes in the 19th century. What I felt was missing was the complexity regarding the reveal of the suspects and crimes. It felt a bit superfluous, when the real focus could have been the characters themselves. A couple of the stories were not particularly memorable.However, this was excellently written
Sebastien de Ulloa is a vampire with a millennium and change to his name, a habit of caring about his food, and the desire to build a new life across the Atlantic in the colonies. Detective Crown Inspector Lady Abigail Irene Garrett is a forensic sorceress who has exiled herself from London for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture. Together, they solve crime.Oh, now, this? This I like.Clever, tense, satisfying mosaic novel. It feels like the best of Bear’s writing: prose like perf...
Five (or so) novelettes--all alt-Victorian steampunk crime dramas, with intelligent characters who don't feel obligated to explain the significance of every insight and incident, and unusual in that most of the stories end with the perp's identification, not an artificial denouement or some violent resolution. A lot of vampiric style sensuousness and sex, but bearable nonetheless. I do wish Garrett had a stronger role to balance Sabastien's Presence--she ends up being more of a follower than an
This is a collection of six mystery novellas and novelettes featuring Abigail Irene and Don Sebastien, and it is an excellent place to start with Elizabeth Bear. It is one of her most accessible works, so if you can find a copy of it (not necessarily easy, with small-press releases) and enjoy quality prose and characters, I strongly recommend checking it out.The novellas are sequential and build on one another, so the collection should be read in order. It starts as Don Sebastien leaves the Old
An airship was no more silent in her passage than a sailing vessel.Through the deck, Sebastien could feel the thrum of engines, the almost subliminal vibration of the cables containing the gas bags within the lifting body, the way the giant aircraft moved in response to the wind plucking at its control cabin and fabric skin. He listened to the ship in the night, and let his mind wander. It was a kind of meditation, and sometimes it helped him uncover surprising truths.3.5 stars, rounded up becau...
Set between 1899 and 1903 in a world where the sun never set on the British Empire, where America is still deeply British on those small territories secured from the natives and with the French breathing down their neck across a tenuous border, New Amsterdam presents the great amateur detective, Don Sebastien de Ulloa. Travelling from Europe to the colonies across the Pacific by dirigible with his trusted young friend Jack, Sebastien is one of the oldest wampyrs living. While wampyrs are welcome...
He's a millennium-old vampire traveling to the New World to avoid vampire politics. She's a detective-mage with a sense of duty that could crack iron.Together... they fight crime! Seriously, New Amsterdam is set in sort of a steampunk/magic/alt-history where the Hadenosaunee(Iriquois) and other native tribes kept the British and French from doing much in the US interior, the Dutch didn't cede their New York territory to Britain until the Napoleonic era, and the US never won independence. Lady Ab...
A series of short stories about a steampunk-magic world Vampire who happens to be a private detective. Okay, so that sounds like an awful premise. But the book itself is quite entertaining, both for the random historical characters who sneak in, the well-thought out alternate history, the pains the vampire takes to hide his 'condition', the hints at background events (a war with France, Civil rights movements) and so on. It's surprisingly cerebrial, but in a candy-coated shell so you don't notic...
3.5I had to start this several times before I was able to get anywhere with it. There are oddities to Bear's style and syntax that make her a more challenging (tiring) read than I'm used to--or that I prefer. It verges on arch, which is not a compliment from me, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it self-indulgent. Mostly you read this for the original set-up, depth of world-building detail--which is frankly pretty extraordinary--and a bracingly fresh heroine. Abigail Irene Garret, unlike vi...
This review has been revised and can now be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud! Note that the edition reviewed is out of print. The eBook for all platforms is $2.99.
I really wanted to like this. I *still* want to like it. In fact, I suspect it's actually a two-star book for me and I gave it an extra one because it's just depressing to give such an awesome concept two stars. But the fact is: I found reading this book either mildly entertaining or straight-up disengaging. Damn it.Part of the problem is that I didn't know what I was getting into. The summaries I'd read made it sound like a sort of steampunk-and-magic-and-vampires detection duo. And that is not...
What a pity that this is out of print. It's a very erudite version of steampunk. On one level, it is a series of chapters* that span the time period from 1899 to 1903. Each of the chapters stand alone, and perhaps in a previous life, they were short stories. Each chapter is its own self-contained mystery which is solved by 1,100-year old vampire and detective, Sebastien de Ulloa, and 50-ish former bombshell, Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, who is not only notorious for her liaisons with powerful, ma...
This book was fantastic! Although I'm not sure why the inside jacket spends more time talking about Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett more than Sebastien de Ulloa, who really is the thread that ties all the stories in this book together.The premise of a forensic sorcerer meeting up with a wampyr detective is quite original. Especially when most of the stories take place in New Amsterdam at the turn of the 20th century. This New Amsterdam (aka NYC) is still a colony of Britain, a...
This is a hard book to review. The writing is lovely, as are the characters. But I find I didn't like it much, because it wasn't what I wanted it to be and I completely disliked the ending. How do you separate that out and be objective in the rating of a book? I don't know that I can. So, I'll just reiterate, the writing is lovely, as are the characters.
See my other reviews at Never Enough BooksAbigail Irene Garrett is a formidable and notorious woman. She drinks far too much and sleeps with married men. She has nothing but obligations. She is also a forensic sorceress, working for a Crown that has done little to win her loyalty.Sebastien de Ulloa is a vampire. Incredibly old, he has forgotten his birth place and even the year he was born. What he does remember is the woman who made him what he is.In a world where the sun never set on the Briti...
This is one of those rather peculiar books that I feel I ought to adore, and actually only mildly like--distressingly much of Elizabeth Bear is like that for me, where it just never quite makes the jump into deep passion. Abigail Irene is a fabulous character, and Sebastian and Jack are at least unconventional, and the world-building is comprehensive and well done, and I just never quite manage to break through into love for the book. I like it well enough to have read it, and re-read it in prep...
This book is probably one of the first books in a long time to make me squeak out loud, cheer out loud, and genuinely cry for the characters. The book is made of short stories and novellas detailing the adventures of DCI Abigail Irene Garrett and Sebastien De Ulloa, a vampiric detective closer to Sherlock Holmes than Nick Knight. I honestly adored this book and as I'm typing here, I wish that I could give it a fair review or even discuss the book in any way, but I can't. While I can clinically d...
3.5 stars.Review posted here at Fantasy Literature: