"You ain't gonna like what I have to tell you, but I'm gonna tell you anyway. See, my name is Karen Memery, like memory only spelt with an e, and I'm one of the girls what works in the Hôtel Mon Cherie on Amity Street. Hôtel has a little hat over the o like that. It's French, so Beatrice tells me."

Set in the late 19th century, when the city we now call Seattle Underground was the whole town (and still on the surface), when airships plied the trade routes, would-be gold miners were heading to the gold fields of Alaska, and steam-powered mechanicals stalked the waterfront, Karen is a young woman on her own, is making the best of her orphaned state by working in Madame Damnable's high-quality bordello. Through Karen's eyes we get to know the other girls in the house —a resourceful group— and the poor and the powerful of the town. Trouble erupts one night when a badly injured girl arrives at their door, begging sanctuary, followed by the man who holds her indenture, and who has a machine that can take over anyone's mind and control their actions. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the next night brings a body dumped in their rubbish heap — a streetwalker who has been brutally murdered.

Wow! Thank you for this wishlist book!

I received this book via a book reseller for the Sci-fi Sweeps. Still can’t believe I won! Thank you Mecu!

This book was a bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but it was rough going at times. The story is told in first-person from Karen's point of view. She's around 16 but, at times, comes across as much older. I very rarely thought of her as a teenager. But then again, it's the Wild West days, so maybe she felt older because she had to be?

The big issues I had with the book were the pacing and, for the life of me, I couldn't keep who is who of the 'girls' in the house straight. For the pacing, eghad! There were times I just had to skim sections as Karen went off on tangents/flashbacks at bizarre times! Like the bar fight scene when she is about to get her head bashed in with a barstool and then you are off to some randomness for a long swath of time. It slowed down the action sequences, and short conversations ended up taking pages to get through.

There were other issues, but those were my big two.

The good? Some great diversity. There's a mad scientist tax/permit! Haha! et. al.

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One of the starting books for the Here Be Dragons Bookbox!

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Took this out of a bookbox.