The Affinity Bridge (Newbury & Hobbes Investigations) [Paperback]

George Mann (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 27, 2010 | Series: Newbury & Hobbes Investigations (Book 1)

Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by unfamiliar inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, while ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen, and journalists.

But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side.

Queen Victoria is kept alive by a primitive life-support system, while her agents, Sir Maurice Newbury and his delectable assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes, do battle with enemies of the crown, physical and supernatural. This time Newbury and Hobbes are called to investigate the wreckage of a crashed airship and its missing automaton pilot, while attempting to solve a string of strangulations attributed to a mysterious glowing policeman, and dealing with a zombie plague that is ravaging the slums of the capital.

Get ready to follow dazzling young writer George Mann to a London unlike any you’ve ever seen and into an adventure you will never forget…

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Steampunk is making a comeback, and with this novel Mann is leading the charge….An engaging melodrama that rattles along at a breakneck pace.” —The Guardian

“Mann is at the forefront of the new generation of UK movers and shakers.Tremendous fun. Mann writes great chase scenes! [The Affinity Bridge] marks George Mann as a writer of enormous promise.”—SFRevu

“Excellent world building; captures the Sherlock Holmes feel; never a boring passage.A hugely entertaining book.” —SFSignal

“An enormous pile of awesome.” —Chris Roberson, World Fantasy Award Finalist and Sideways Award Winner

About the Author

GEORGE MANN heads the editorial and production teams of two divisions of the UK-based Games Workshop: Solaris Books, a SF/Fantasy publisher, and Black Library, a publisher of game-related fiction. He is the editor of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction anthology series and the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books, including The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Human Abstract, and Time Hunter: The Severed Man.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; Reprint edition (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765323222
• ISBN-13: 978-0765323224
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Clockwork and steam April 13, 2010

By E. A Solinas HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

It's a pretty brilliant idea for a novel -- an special agent of Queen Victoria, sent out to deal with weird and supernatural threats.

And the concept fits in seamlessly in George Mann's first novel "The Affinity Bridge," which reads like Arthur Conan Doyle decided to write a thriller set in a steampunk fantasy world. It's an engaging story written in a slow-moving but detailed style, and Mann keeps things interesting by peppering his story with all sorts of strange twists -- airships, clockwork robots, and zombie plagues. The only flaw is the underwritten leads.

While investigating a string of strangulations in the Whitechapel area, Sir Maurice Newbury is called away by the ailing Queen Victoria -- an airship has crashed in Finsbury Park.

With the help with his assistant Veronica Hobbes, Newbury soon discovers that the airship may have crashed and burned because it was being piloted by an automaton -- a clockwork robot that is mysteriously absent from the wreckage. They start investigating the manufacturers of both the automaton and the airship, Chapman and Villiers, but haven't got much more than a bad vibe from Chapman and a creepy history from Villiers.

Unfortunately the two cases -- strangulation and airship -- intertwine when a potential informant is strangled in Whitechapel. Newbury and Hobbes investigate further, but Whitechapel is full of more dangers than just the strangler, since there are also zombielike flesh-eating plague victims wandering around the place. And when a badly wounded Newbury is attacked by a pair of lethal automatons, he discovers the horrifying facts behind their creation....

Steam-powered carriages, clockwork robots, airships and the occasional mad scientist with a giant sewing machine -- while the Victorian London of "Affinity Bridge" isn't radically different from our own, George Mann adds all sorts of weird little details into his story. And those steampunkian items aren't just surface flash to make the whole book cooler and more fantastical -- the complex, winding mystery hinges on some of these fictional inventions.

To match his story, Mann also writes in a sort of modern-Victorian style -- richly detailed, atmospheric and full of mannered interactions. But he also spins up some fast-paced, bloody action scenes and grotesque fights (particularly with the "zombies" and automatons), as well as a climactic chase through the airshipyards. The secret of why the automatons are malfunctioning is a shocker, and Mann evokes just the right amount of horror from it.

And as a mystery writer, Mann does an excellent job winding together different mysteries in a plausible manner, even if the bad guy's identity is quite clear early on in the book (though not necessarily the how and why). And there are substantial plot threads left hanging -- especially in the epilogue -- hinting at future stories.

The biggest problem is the characterizations, which never feel entirely fleshed out -- okay, Maurice is a Holmesian genius with a weakness for laudanum and a rather murky history that seems to be made up as it goes along. Hobbes is a smart, capable woman who can do her own investigations. Although they are fairly likable characters, neither one is really expanded beyond their basic outlines -- especially since we hear hardly anything about their daily lives, their pasts, their families, et cetera.

"The Affinity Bridge" suffers from underwritten lead characters, but has a solid mystery plot and a richly-imagined steampunk world. If he can flesh them out a little, the next Newbury and Hobbes book is sure to be a pure delight. Read more ›

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars written by automatons May 13, 2010

By Paul Mcguire

Format:Hardcover

I've just finished reading "The Affinity Bridge" by George Mann and can honestly say that it was as painful an experience as being operated on without anesthetic in a Victorian hospital.

The story is a blatant rip off of already tired cliches in multiple genres, from the sub Sherlock Holmes character of Sir Maurice Newbury (who is addicted to laudanam as oppose to cocaine) to his demure but sexy tough new assistant Veronica Hobbes (think the Avengers) and basically every other characterization and plot development that seems to have wandered in from any well known sci fi or horror movie (Dr. Frankenstein, The Terminator, the zombies of 28 Days later etc).

Sometimes the story telling has to throw up such laughable plot devices as to be jaw droppingly terrible:

After fighting off rampaging "revenants" (plague ridden, flesh eating zombies) but bleeding profusely from several bites, Newbury informs his companions, who already think that he is done for due to the zombie bites, that everything's OK because he happened to have been bitten in India when he was a young man but survived the onset of the plague because he was immune...

When fighting an attack by the brass automatons (bad Dr. Who issue cybermen meet the Terminator) he just happens to be trapped in a corner where there's a massive axe and a ball and chain on the wall which both come in very handy thank you very much...

The book has a feel of being created by a computer program and you long for a more mature style with narrative depth and believable characters that is written by an author with new ideas or at least far more subtle and evolved re-imaginings.

Please spend your time reading any of the following books before succumbing to this one's dumbed down incredulities......

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (Gordon Dahlquist)
Mr Norrell and Jonathan Strange (Susanna Clarke)
The Manual of Detection (Jedidiah Berry) Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Nice Idea, Poor Execution March 6, 2011

By M. Deeds

Format:Paperback

The idea for this book is quite nice, but an inadequate plot, lack of characterization and poor prose sabotage the clever concepts here. The attempt to make Maybury a Holmesian investigator falls short because he does no detecting. The thinking seems to be; "Holmes was an addict, so Maybury will be an addict too." Maybury and his assistant Veronica Hobbs show up at crime scenes and investigate, but they do no deductive work. Maybury is supposed to be an addict, a scholar and a thinker--we see the addict and the scholar only.

There is a lot of action; but the action sequences do not link up in a coherent fashion to form an actual plot. Our two heroes do nothing to drive the action; because they do not detect, their actions have no impact on what happens. Much of this is structural; characters are given information that they decide to follow up on "tomorrow," so they can sip brandy and think about things. The solution to the twin mysteries is transparent to the reader early on; but the villains have to send assassins after Maybury before he figures it out.

Hobbs and Maybury have the beginnings of characterization, but they have no chemistry. The best relationship in the book is between Hobbs and her sister Amelia, and it is a subplot. Maybury is virtually super-human; in the last quarter of the book, an assasilant crushes several of his fingers in a fight. In subsequent scenes, there is no mention of crushed, or even slightly sore fingers.

Characters survive life-threatening situations and then casually drop explanations in the, "Oh, didn't I mention. . .?" manner. ("Oh, I have body armor." "Oh, I'm immune to all African poisons," etc.) Mann is perhaps trying to create a 1910-era Penny Dreadful.... That might also explain the occasional dips into stilted, mock-formal English. This is a good conceit, but it needs to be consistent.

Mann clearly has story-telling ability and merely misses success here. His future books may be better. As a rule, I don't think people should hire line-editors, but Mann could use one. He makes small but annoying grammar mistakes; his descriptions are familiar and in general the writing is flat. All of these problems just accentuate the story problems. Read more ›