Ghosts of War

I have not read Mann's first novel about The Ghost, Ghosts of Manhattan, so I'll go drone, waffle, blegh. However I have just finished Ghosts of War. So here's a little review of it.

Gabriel Cross, millionaire playboy and ex-soldier, is also The Ghost, a mysterious vigilante who patrols the rooftops and skies of 1920's New York, righting wrongs and performing deeds of derringdo. So far, so Batman. But then Mann introduces the Steampunk elements that skew the story into an alternative reality where Queen Victoria has only recently died, her daughter Alberta is on the throne, and Britain and America are locked into a deadly cold war. Flying automatons called Raptors are abducting people seemingly at random. A British spy is on the loose with dangerous information. And a crooked Senator is spoiling to start war with the British Empire.

Mann then ramps it up even more by going all Lovecraftian and confronting the reader with nightmare creatures from another dimension, who like the taste of human blood. Oh and a leper who has replaced his limbs with mechanical ones of his own design. By himself. Yeah, me too. How the hell he wired them into his nervous system so that his brain can control them is ever explained. In fact the are some major plot points that are never satisfactorily explained.

Mann's writing is pedestrian and he has a tendency to repeat the same character motivations over and over through the book. Yeah, Cross is a war damaged, driven vigilante mourning the loss of his lover, I get it. No need to repeat ad infinitum.

This is basically 21st Century pulp fiction. Moving Steampunk away from Victoriana into the decadence of 20's New York is a nice idea, but he never comes close to capturing the hedonism of that decade, and his ideas are half formed and ill-thought out.

So, a noble failure then. It's okay if you like this sort of thing, but I'm sure there are better Steampunk novels out there.