Avon, June 26 2012, $7.99
ISBN: 9780062127648
Cherry St. Croix knows high society considers her an undesirable due to her parents; a dead madman and a deceased mother. Being an outcast enables Cherry to earn a modest living as a collector bounty hunter, which in turn pays for her expensive habits.
Her occupation takes her to parts of London that her societal peers prefer to pretend do not exist or are home to riffraff. She delivers her current bounty to the Midnight Menagerie run by the mysterious Karkash Veil. There the Menagerie ringmaster Micajah Hawke welcomes her in his eerie way while her scientific pursuits above the drift lead to Cornelius Kerrigan Compton. However, neither man can rival the third male in her life, a killer she plans to collect the bounty on.
The first St. Croix Chronicles steampunk Victorian London is an engaging first person account of a young woman not fully part of any of the three worlds she traverses. The heroine is a terrific protagonist who takes readers on a tour of different London’s with the steam powered impoverished residing in smog and the steel stilted affluence above the filthy air. In some ways the city steals the show as Cherry stalks a killer stalking London.
Harriet Klausner
