Title: Memento Mori
Author: Katy O’Dowd
Genre: steampunk
Price: $3.99 (ebook) / $11.69
(paperback)
Publisher: Untold Press
ISBN: 978-0692022351
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib
The back-cover blurb for this book talks about
taking a walk with the Victorian English Mafia.
I have to say, I wish I had read that first, because I found myself
wasting sympathy on the death of an English crime lord in Chapter 1. I eventually caught on, although in fairness
to the author, I was supposed to find Mr. Lamb sympathetic.
Memento Mori is a difficult book to
categorize. I’ve ended up listing it as
“steampunk” but even that’s a bit unfair.
There’s nothing in the book that’s not solidly within Victorian
technologies. However, its sensibilities
are distinctly non-Victorian, featuring a female Irish assassin, O’Murtagh,
working on behalf of a young woman, Carmine Fox. O’Murtagh is given a list of enemies to kill
by Fox, and she goes to work, rather gleefully (and fairly realistically)
killing a collection of Victorian stuffed shirts – all affiliated with the Lamb
family. The Lambs prove ill-named, being
more wolves than sheep.
Various bloody complications ensue, including a
convenient discovery by O’Murtagh, and an extended visit to London’s famous
Bedlam mental hospital. (Your Reviewer
recently visited there, as it is now the site of the Imperial War Museum. Any irony on putting a war museum on the
grounds of a lunatic asylum is purely intentional.)
I found the story and writing well-done, and
the characters well-realized. I did have
a bit of an issue – too much of the plot hinges on the idea that when
Victorians engaged in mourning, they did not manage their businesses for a year
and a day. Although that may be true, I
found that hard to swallow, especially for a crime family that may not be fully
“respectable.”
At any rate, I quite enjoyed Memento Mori.
8/10