Stephanie Jane recenzis Blood Sky At Night de Steve Turnbull
Too short for the story!
3 steloj
I enjoyed reading the first Maliha Anderson novella, Murder Out Of The Blue, way back in November 2014 so I was pleased at how easy I found it to slip back into Steve Turnbull's invented reality for Blood Sky At Night. Set in Edwardian era Ceylon, Maliha's second mystery is the disappearance of one Mary Carnforth. Mary, like Maliha, is a former Roedean School student, but now her position as teacher to Bali princess Ngurah seems to have led her into trouble.
I liked Turnbull's scene setting and descriptions of the wealth and race contrasts across Ceylonese society. Maliha, being part-Indian and part-Scottish, doesn't quite fit in anywhere which makes her perfect to observe on our behalf. Etiquette and class rules are realistically British Empire, and then we get fantastical steampunk touches in the form of vehicles and airships to remind us that this world isn't quite ours after all. …
I enjoyed reading the first Maliha Anderson novella, Murder Out Of The Blue, way back in November 2014 so I was pleased at how easy I found it to slip back into Steve Turnbull's invented reality for Blood Sky At Night. Set in Edwardian era Ceylon, Maliha's second mystery is the disappearance of one Mary Carnforth. Mary, like Maliha, is a former Roedean School student, but now her position as teacher to Bali princess Ngurah seems to have led her into trouble.
I liked Turnbull's scene setting and descriptions of the wealth and race contrasts across Ceylonese society. Maliha, being part-Indian and part-Scottish, doesn't quite fit in anywhere which makes her perfect to observe on our behalf. Etiquette and class rules are realistically British Empire, and then we get fantastical steampunk touches in the form of vehicles and airships to remind us that this world isn't quite ours after all.
Blood Sky At Night is short at about a hundred pages and I think this is what lets it down. There isn't enough space to show Ceylon and to tell the mystery story so, to me, the mystery side felt incomplete and disjointed. I am sure Maliha understands why she visits various locations, and why the gangs and villains act as they do. However we readers aren't often let in on her detective reasoning and this made much of the mystery impossible to follow.