Halo Round The Moon by Steve Turnbull

Halo Round The Moon by Steve Turnbull
Published by Tau Press in June 2014.

Featured in Cover Characteristics: Aeroplanes

Where to buy this book:
Buy the ebook from Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk

How I got this book:
Bought the ebook from Amazon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

'Pneumatic trains, steampunk air-planes, karmic sex and bloody murder in 1908 India.
When the heir to an industrial empire suffers a fatal accident, Maliha Anderson is called in to determine whether darker forces are at work. What she discovers goes deeper than any crime she's ever investigated. She is forced into intimate contact with the suppressed passions of post-Victorian society and goes far beyond the bounds of what's proper and decent, to bring the murderer to justice.'

Halo Round The Moon is third in Turnbull's Maliha Anderson steampunk mystery series. The novels are set in 1900s India and I like how the atmosphere and etiquette of this time is accurately evoked. Alongside the historical aspects, we also have wondrous fantasy steampunk inventions which, to my mind at least, come across as being perfectly possible and certainly fit aesthetically with the period setting.

I wasn't as convinced by the mystery aspect of Halo Round The Moon as I had been with previous books in the series. Sexuality is a strong theme of the story, but it is hidden behind so many layers of Edwardian repression that I often found it difficult to work exactly what characters were talking about and missed how Maliha made several important deductions. The strength of the book though, for me, is Turnbull's steampunk universe and I was as entranced by the train here as I was by the steamship in the first book of the series, Murder Out Of The Blue. I would so love to see these romantic transports in real life!


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Books by Steve Turnbull / Steampunk fiction / Books from England