New Amsterdam

Thanks to a combination of grim weather and general exhaustion, I spent Sunday tucked up with Elizabeth Bear's deliciously wonderful New Amsterdam — the first section of which is available online.

Composed of six linked short stories, set largely in an alternate America — one that never seceded from the British Empire — at the start of the twentieth century, the book follows the fortunes of a pair of investigators, Don Sebastien de Ulloa, amateur detective and ancient vampire, and Abigail Irene Garrett, Crown Investigator and sorcerer, as they investigate hideous murders and negotiate the murky political waters of Colonial politics.

The setting, part steampunk and part gothic horror, is a delight. The opening feature a transatlantic zeppelin — complete with light-weight furniture and a glamourous passenger list — while the final story in the collection, set in a fashionably Paris, features a city so modern it has embraced a system of wireless electricity invented by everyone's favourite electrical engineer, Nikolai Tesla.

The characters, too, are rather wonderful. Garrett is a tough investigator, used to walking the thin line between her loyalty to the crown and her professional need to keep herself in favour with the New Amsterdam city authorities, but still somehow able to complicate her personal life with a series of slightly unfortunate liaisons. Initially sceptical of Sebastien, whom she considers to be a dilettante, she gradually becomes convinced by his honesty and his abilities, eventually becoming a part of his extended family. Sebastien, for all his wariness about his involvement with short-lived humans, is a curiously dependent figure, relying on his friends to maintain his existence, and not at all the proud, independent and immoral vampire of legend.

Needless to say, I very much enjoyed New Amsterdam and I'm very much looking forward to reading Seven for a Secret when it comes out.