In Victorian London at the height of the industrial revolution, Horatio Lyle is a former Special Constable with a passion for science and invention. He's also an occasional, but reluctant, sleuth. The truth is that he'd rather be in his lab tinkering with dangerous chemicals and odd machinery than running around the cobbled streets of London trying to track down stolen goods. But when Her Majesty's Government calls, Horatio swaps his microscope for a magnifying glass, fills his pockets with things that explode and sallies forth to unravel a mystery of a singularly extraordinary nature.

A sort of clever steampunk take on Inspector Gadget (except the good Inspector is also clever and capable; perhaps more like the Doctor). Maybe a little twee. But tremendously good fun. ( )

I'm not sure there are words for how much I love this book, and indeed the whole series.
- Webb's style of writing is something great, few books have such a strong sense of setting that you can almost feel it in places, but this does.
- The characters, in part, are the usual fare, but they're built on well, becoming something a bit more- Lyle is possibly my favourite character from anything- and the dialogue is just great.
- It took me a couple of times reading through for me to fully appreciate it- the narrative can be quite thick in places; I still find myself having to read certain paragraphs a couple of times, but stick with it, read it again, because it just gets better. ( )

It started off as an exciting book with a very unusual protagonist Horatio, but half way through you kind of feel lost and the end is kind of incomplete ( )

Being a modern young adult fantasy novel about a Victorian scientist (my favorite thing!), this book should have been great. It wasn't. The plot was a muddle-- I never figured out what the "villains" were actually going to do if they succeeded-- and the main characters were all poorly motivated and one-dimensional, ranging from a stereotypically absent-minded scientist, to a gutsy girl thief, to a prim and proper young lord. The characters' attitudes feel obnoxious on occasion, and they often fail to notice the most obvious things; there's a sequence where Horatio Lyle is told by a women that she was hypnotized to attack him, and then he's surprised when she attacks him! I wasn't interested in the storyline or the characters, meaning that by the end it was dull-dull-dull.

Stylistically, it was also aggravating. The book switches into the present tense for random scenes, but what is worse is Webb's tendency to write long passages with nothing but lines of dialogue: no actions, no descriptors, no nothing. This is only exacerbated by one of my least favorite "mysterious" techniques, scenes of dialogue where none of the speakers are identified. I find them boring and obnoxious attempts to generate suspense where none exists.

And then there's a scene where one of the characters inspires Thomas Hardy to write Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Despite being nothing like Tess. I groaned. Loudly.