Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar. 412 p.
Cleo, Milady de Winter, grew up a street orphan in Paris and traveled Vespuccia as the Dahomey Amazon in Barnum & Bailey's Circus. Now she works for the Quiet Council, the shadowy rulers of Paris, keeping the peace in her city. But the murder of a man in the Rue Morgue is more complicated than it seems....
There's a lot of really cool stuff in this book. The setting is great--decadent 1893 Paris, full of automata, with Les Lezards across the water, minions of the Middle Kingdom's Dowager Empress using the Gobelin factory to make automaton goblins, and the Council of Chiefs in charge of freedom-loving Vespuccia. (And I always enjoy playing Spot the Reference, which was quite a lot of fun here--I especially like Q, the hunchback who lurks in the tunnels under the city, providing information but in a hurry to get back to his Esme.) I'm not a big fan of the actual writing style--sometimes the choppy sentences would distract me from the story--but the action scenes are generally well done, and the settings are really cool.
I understand this is a sequel to The Bookman, which I think might be set in England and thus might have more lizards in. I'm curious enough about the setting that I'll definitely be hunting it down.
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