Clementine

Clementine (2010) Cherie Priest

Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey is mad as hell: someone has stolen his ship, the “Free Crow,” and he’ll stop at nothing to get it back, even if that means going back into Confederate territory, where he’ll be (at best) hung as a runaway slave.

Maria Isabella Boyd has been discarded by the Confederacy. She’s become too well-known to act as a spy any longer, and her late husband was a Union soldier, which made the South doubt her loyalty. So now she’s working for the Pinkerton agency, hoping her skills as a spy will serve her well as a detective.

We met Hainley (and the Free Crow) in passing in Boneshaker, but you don’t have to have read that book to read Clementine.

This is straight-up steam punk. Dirigibles are used in the war between the North and the South, and the war has stretched on and on and on.

It was very interesting–I really didn’t want to have any sympathy for a confederate spy–I’ve never bought the whole “War of Northern Aggression” bullshit touted by the deep south. Yet I did eventually find Belle Boyd sympathetic, as much as I didn’t want to.

And I think that mentally, I was willing to forgive Hainley a lot of sins, because he was an ex-slave.

All-in-all, it was a very interesting idea.
Rating: 7/10

Published by Subterranean Press

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