Steam Sleuth #2: Concerning the Demise of Sir Waldraff Fammory Bleen

by Stanley Bruce Carter

When Sir Waldraff Fammory Bleen – the famous aeronaut, industrialist and all-around asshole – is killed by a Vindanian flying death dagger, Bombalay police inspector Hanop Rasavan asks Lt. Aubrianna Chellbamber to help him solve the case ... much to the annoyance of Capt. Lank Vadis, who suspects the handsome Rasavan is more interested in Aubrianna than the investigation.

73 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 20, 2014

Reviews

[Matthew Pilkington · Rating 4 out of 5]

We start off with a nobleman celebrating an engineering success of a revolutionary new flying machine with his wife and some friends one evening, and by the time we reach page nine, we have a falling out among friends, and end to a number of business associations, betrayals and a broken marriage revealed. And to finish off an auspicious start, a death that draws the attention of two government down upon it.

Lt. Aubrianna Chellbamber, Special Investigator of Perplexing Incidents for the Royal Foglandian Air Corps returns to investigate a murder where a large number of the associates of the victim have motives in a world that is not our own but bears many distorted similarities to ours.

The steampunk technology used in the novel is not thrust upon the reader but merely forms parts of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of the growing world of Stanley Bruce Carter, accepted by them just as we would accept the use of a toaster or an electric light.

Finishing this second tale in the Steam Sleuth series, I am both satisfied with what I have just read and hungry for the next tale and more detail about this expanding world.