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336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
The first, and perhaps the biggest, shock was when I realized that the book is set 16 YEARS after the last one. Tom and Hester in their thirties, have a fifteen year old daughter named Wren. Anchorage has long since settled on dry land and have been content with a simple life there.
It’s like being lured into a false sense of security. You never see it coming, it’s so sudden. From this:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got himself lumbered with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke.”
The story forms a neat little circle with the other previous books where everything connects and does so in a believable way. The characters of the story are, pardon the cliché, layered and complex. The old ones more so than the new ones. I’ll take Hester first. She was a surprise in this one through and through. I didn’t expect it but it made perfect sense.
And so we see Hester in Infernal Devices as she finally gets a chance to try to prove her “usefulness” to her family by rescuing her daughter. She is ruthless in the book and kills without preamble or mercy. I felt sorry for her, hated her, felt sorry for her, hated her and felt sorry for her again. The second biggest shock was her not dying because by God, she had it coming. In the end, her decision was the one that made sense.
I loved seeing Shrike and Anna Fang again. His turmoil was another fun dynamic to explore. Out of the new characters I loved Oenone Zero the most and Wren the ungrateful wretch the least. The plot was like shards-of-metal-flying-after-an-explosion sequence played in reverse. Going everywhere but became whole at the end.