A super new historical crime story by the author of the Magnificent Devices steampunk series. This one sends you flying into the stormy world of airship exploration. Germany’s in a race with the other Great Powers to take an airship across the Atlantic, and Lady Hay has wrangled herself a passage on a promise to report the voyage for the Hurst corporation newspapers. In fact, she’s the only woman with 59 male crew members and journalists.
When a mysterious death disrupts the voyage with the Spanish coast barely out of sight behind them, Lady Hay is trapped above the turbulent sea with a desperate killer on the loose.
This author does an amazing job of setting the scene and the mood of the late 1920s, when the world held so much technological promise, and everybody wanted to be the first to achieve the next milestone.
Lady Hay is a promising sleuth, a competent widow leaving behind a parcel of grown stepchildren to pursue her independent career as a reporter. She has a marvelous eye for fashion, a basic grasp of airship function, and a not so secret yearning for the renewed attentions of a handsome fellow traveler. Being a reporter, she can ask questions that not only reveal clues but help ground readers in the complications and restrictions of airship travel. Can she take a second pair of shoes to match her evening frock in New York, or will that put her over her very tight luggage weight allowance? Readers in any era of air travel will feel for her in those decisions.
But much more than that, this tale is a competent mystery as tightly plotted as any cruise ship killing. The suspects are a good variety, and the victim is much more interesting than first appears.
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