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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 in Europe, they are most definitely not in the colonies, so he and Jack work hard to keep it a secret on board the air ship. It’s not long, however, before Sebastien’s detective skills are required when a passenger disappears, and a sorcerer reveals his true nature.

When he arrives in New Amsterdam � only recently handed over to the British by the Dutch � Sabestien teams up with Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett, a sorcerer who drinks a lot, is loyal to the Crown � or at least, the oath she took to serve it � and is having an affair with Duke Richard, the British Empire’s representative in New Amsterdam. The two find themselves neck-deep in grisly paranormal murders and international politics, along with Jack and a curious widow who writes fiction, Phoebe Smith.

This is my first Bear outing, and I have to admit from the outset that it didn’t greatly impress me. I always start a book with a feeling of excitement, of possibilities, with my mind open to a fresh new story. It took a while for Bear’s actual story to get boring, but I think her writing style here made it rather plodding from the start. Normally, I like a high level of detail, but because I found her sentence structure often hard to follow, or clunky, the details just became burdens.

Part of my problem is, I freely admit, that I don’t care for mystery/detective/crime type stories much. I have enjoyed some, extremely so. This wasn’t one of them, sadly. I couldn’t follow their leaps of reasoning � hell, sometimes I couldn’t even follow a simple statement! It only makes me frustrated. You know those conversations, those slices of dialogue, where a character says something that sounds random, but others in room go “Ahh� or jump from there to some new realisation � this book was full of those. (I can’t really give you examples, you’d have to read the whole thing.)

Structurally, the book is comprised of chapters or parts that are something like connected short stories or novellas � each deals with a new and separate mystery to solve, but as a whole they are meant to tell a greater story than the sum of their parts. I say “meant to� because one of the biggest disappointments for me was how lacking the overall story was. Here we have two very interesting characters � an old, lonely wampyr who’s forgotten much of his past, and an intelligent, strong, independent sorceress who defeats beasts and the like, in an America where the indigenous tribes still hold much of their land, and where war with the French looms. The biggest let-downs were that there’s no great character development or change going on, and the setting � the very alternate history that so fascinates me � was only loosely sketched out, never really explored, and didn’t always make sense.

On the positive side, I did like the two main characters and Jack, and I did like the sensuality that we get glimmers of � it was very nicely done, especially around Sebastien’s potent bite. I was thrown by the very last line � Garrett tells her black maid, who wants to stay in Paris, “On your head be it�, which, am I wrong? I always understood to be something of a threat, or warning. It means “Fine, do what you like, but I take no responsibility for the consequences so don’t come to me for help if it goes wrong.� Which doesn’t match the scene - she was giving her maid her blessing. I wonder if it has more to do with the overall editing � and copy-editing � because the book was rife with mistakes, not to mention my dissatisfaction with the clunky sentence structure. And when a book’s lacklustre qualities stand out this much for me, I lose interest in its other points � its themes, its attempts at being profound.

For such a short book, it took me far too long to get through and hasn’t made me all that eager to read more of Elizabeth Bear � though I don’t want to dismiss her after just one book.