The Bookman / Lavie Tidhar

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar. 394 p.

In my review of Camera Obscura I said I hoped that The Bookman would have more lizards in, and indeed it does. How can it not, when Queen Victoria is a lizard? Set in London around 1895 (maybe), Orphan, a poet, proposes to Lucy, a marine biologist who studies whales. Lucy is killed during the Bookman's attempt to sabotage the launch of Prime Minister Moriarty's Mars probe. But the Bookman tells Orphan he can get Lucy back. All he has to do is what the Bookman asks him...which includes, among other things, traveling to the mysterious island from which the lizards originally came.

I enjoyed this a lot, and am looking forward to the third volume in the series, The Great Game, which is due out in January. The lizards-related stuff was lots of fun, and Spot the Reference was even more enjoyable that it was in Camera Obscura--in fact, there's a scene in a bookstore where Orphan is looking through many books, and I only recognized about a quarter of the title/author jokes. I'm looking forward to investigating the ones I'm missing. (Although the presence in that bookstore of a mystery novel by Harriet Vane rather calls into doubt the 1895-ish setting of the story--there's no way Vane could have published a book before 1920. All of the other internal hints about the setting indicate some time between 1891 and 1895, though.)