Brilliant Devices (Magnificent Devices #4)

Book four in the Magnificent Devices steampunk series! A lady of resources has the power to change the world-if she can stay alive long enough to do it. Lady Claire Trevelyan had been looking forward to glittering balls, congenial society, and relief from pursuit during her stay with Lord and Lady Dunsmuir in the Canadas. Well, perhaps not entirely. Being pursued by a handsome airship captain is rather diverting, especially when it appears her erstwhile employer, Andrew Malvern, is becoming much too distracted by a certain blond mechanic. But a shot fired in the night puts an end to such diversions, and instead plunges her and her orphaned band of children into a fight for their very survival. Between secret conversations at the highest levels of society and skullduggery in the diamond mines, Claire must discover who is behind a series of alarming attempts on her friends' lives-before her mother is compelled to make funeral arrangements yet again. "I have a big grin on my face which is my Magnificent Devices grin-it's impossible not to smile your way through this book. It's such swashbucklingly good fun. The tone has that wonderful lightness of humour and joy that keeps up in even the direst of situations. At the same time it wonderfully maintains the sense of time and place-the Victorian feel, the language, the class, the clothing, the attitudes are all extremely vivid, carefully maintained and, at times, gloriously lampooned." -Fangs for the Fantasy, on Brilliant Devices