A review by branch_c
The Shadow Master by Craig Cormick

3.0

This was a mix of some very interesting concepts with some less interesting ones, and the result would depend on how cleverly these concepts were combined to tell the story. For me, McCormick did not quite succeed. The idea of the two houses competing to rule the city was a good one, and giving each side their own genius in the form of Galileo and Leonardo was extremely clever (though their houses are switched in the blurb on the back of the book - did the author not even get to proof that??). Unfortunately the relationships between the central characters and their close relations struck me as mostly squalid and unpleasant - maybe this was what the writer was going for, since clearly the whole system was unstable, its precariousness largely due to the rulers' clumsiness and lack of vision for their city. The "scientific" advances involving the blending of humans and mechanical devices were more magic than science, which again was not necessarily a bad concept, but I felt these needed to be explained a little better rather than left mysterious - after all, the geniuses should have known how this stuff worked. The twist at the end struck me as a little abrupt - an interesting idea, but if a writer's going to do something like that, I'd like it to not only unexpected, but also obvious in hindsight, and for me, this wasn't. Anyway, somewhat enjoyable.