Daggers in Darkness

Luz and Ciara are American secret agents in the year 1922 of an alternative world in which Theodore Roosevelt is still President and the Great War turned out quite differently. This is the fourth book in the series, and we've jumped 5 years since the third one, because Luz and Ciara took time off to become mothers. They now have four young children (two each), a Chinese nanny who doubles as swordswoman, and couple of young-adult Japanese-American sisters who tag along with them.

After their long break, they're given a mission to investigate an unidentified organization that's selling off a bunch of previously unknown and very valuable Chinese antiques, possibly in order to finance weapons of mass destruction. In pursuit of this mission, the whole gang including children flies off to Shanghai by airship, arriving in Chapter 12, two-thirds of the way through the book.

The first 10 chapters are set in California and consist of preliminary discussions and activities, in which not a lot happens, apart from one isolated outbreak of deadly combat.

Shanghai is more lively, and there's a larger-scale outbreak of deadly combat, for which they need to recruit local assistance. However, two more volumes of the series are expected, and this mission will continue in the next.

This is a more than usually self-indulgent novel from Stirling. He always researches his fiction heavily, and likes to display his research in the form of background details, which I quite often appreciate and like; but here he does it to such excess as to overwhelm the story. The book is full of detailed descriptions of what everyone is wearing and eating, and linguistic notes on all the various languages and dialects that he manages to cram into it. There are also technological and historical notes from time to time.

The story accompanying all these background details begins to seem an afterthought; it's more perfunctory and less credible than usual.

Overall, I give it three stars because I'm still willing to reread it occasionally: I give two stars to books that I'm not interested in rereading. However, it's a rather marginal three stars: say two and a half stars.

The primary heroine Luz is half-Cuban and frequently breaks into Spanish, so you may feel more comfortable with these books if you can read Spanish; although anything significant to the story is translated into English for you. I live in Spain; I'm not a fluent speaker, but I'm accustomed to the language and it doesn't bother me. I don't pronounce it as Luz would—because I've learned Spanish in Spain, and also because I'm British.