Quick and Dirty
Read this if: You like gaslamp fantasy, you like re-imaginings of history, you like action and you’re patient enough to wait for it.
Don’t read this if: you can’t get through a slow opening.
Get your copy here. (All links in this review are Amazon affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you make a purchase.)
The Details
Eric Lewis writes in a fascinating universe. There are no dragons, there are no other races, and there’s no magic. But there are alchemists, and the potent substance they create known as Vril. It’s set in a time period not unlike the era of Sherlock Holmes, with steam power coming into its own, guns used far more than swords, and the mysterious vril powering the lights on the streets.
In The Artificer’s Knot, we meet Ran, a young artificer expelled from school over a trumped up charge. With no diploma, he has no way to turn his skills into a living until he encounters the gangster Gouger Nebb. From this meeting comes a tale that re-imagines the dawn of the oil age. An artificer is something like an engineer, and gangster has big plans to profit off the young student’s skills.
Let’s get the bad out of the way first. My biggest complaint with this book is that it starts slow. Although there are occasional moments of tension thrown in, Ran’s gradual ascent in Nebb’s gang isn’t action-packed. But this period of worldbuilding and character development is carried along by Eric’s good writing. The author is a skilled artisan of the English language, and fluent, fast-moving prose gets us through the slow part.
Once the bad guys destroy a big project—the big project—of Ran’s and Nebb’s, that’s when the action starts, and from there on in I was burning through pages to see how things turned out. The plot is suspenseful, the threat is meaningful, and the characters are easy to like.
The fictional universe here is almost a character in its own right. “The Cryptarchy,” kind of like the MI-5 or the FBI of this world, is a fun factor in all of Lewis’s stories, and the alchemists and the powerful, dangerous substance known as vril is too.
Some profanity. Some fade to black love scenes (I think I might enjoy a story about live interest Filene on her own). Some violence but no more than the plot requires. Not gory.
Grab a copy of The Artificer’s Knot on Amazon.
And hey, if you like elaborate worldbuilding, check out my Exile War series. Book one, Onslaught, is free, and it introduces a world of genetically engineered telepaths, pig-human hybrids, and a war between good and evil that stretches across the stars. Check it out here.