Brilliant Shadows: A Floating City and Shadow Town novel

by Alex Marks

It's the jazz age, and Lady Simmy Fox-Wallace and her brother, Simon, are members of the Fast Set. London is their playground, where all the most famous landmarks and beautiful thoroughfares have been joined together onto a flying platform and raised high into the air. Beneath the wonder that is the Floating City, Shadow Town lurks in perpetual darkness, impoverished and ignored. But Simmy is bored, and Simon is dead - a ghost occupying a mechanical body made for him by their friend and polymath, Jackie Jo. She has recently returned to London, accompanied by a sentient mechanical panther of great antiquity. Together they've opened the Tin Cat Club, a beacon of music and entertainment in the gloomy Shadows.

Alexei, spy for the Empress Anastasia, arrives to steal Jackie Jo's mechanical companion, but other plots are afoot and he finds himself framed for a deadly explosion that Simon's friend, Detective Inspector Charlie Temple, is investigating. Pitted against his erstwhile colleague, Valentina Petrova, and thrown into fellowship with Simmy and her crowd, Alexei joins forces with Charlie to uncover a traitor and to save London from the worst danger it has ever faced.

In this counterfactual Steam Punk story, Assyrian gods, ghosts, plotters, mechanicals, anarchists, and Bright Young Things are woven expertly together into a fantastical tour-de-force.

475 pages, Paperback

Published November 20, 2022