I haven't read anything by Premee Mohamed before, though this book places her securely on my list of authors to watch. Anyone who describes herself as "writer & eldritch monster" is someone I want to read and her website is currently highlighting 'From the Library of Jurgen Leitner', which looks to be as far up my alley as it's comfortable to get. She hails from parts unknown, though she identifies as Indo-Caribbean, and lives in Edmonton, Alberta. She's a scientist as well as an author, with a degree in molecular genetics. She's won a Locus, a Nebula and two World Fantasy Awards. I need to read more.

While she has a trilogy to her name, most of her work seems to be standalone and this novel is an impressive example. I challenge anyone to put hand on heart and pronounce that they don't want more from the city of Wickhills. I want dozens of books set there. However, this story is told and it wouldn't benefit from sequels, so I don't expect anything else to venture into Wickhills unless it's unrelated in all but location. It's a peach of a location because it's just as much of a character. The lead, Vycol Ferec, is a map nerd and he knows the city and its nooks and crannies about as well as anyone does, but it changes when it wants to. As a fellow map nerd, I have an abiding fondness for malleable geography. Wickhills makes me happy.

Mohamed sets the stage quickly and well. Wickhills has an overt Victorian flavour, though it plays more in gaslamp than steampunk, with unseen urchins walking treadmills to ensure the blades of windmills continue to turn. The primary influence is British, though the coinage does seem a little inconsistent. We see tuppence, shillings and guineas in circulation but also a 50p piece, the single anomaly I found. Everything's fantasy, down to the Market Street Wyrm, a living dragon wrapped around the dome of the old mall. And Ferec is a spy, so we're in for a tale of espionage.

He and Tanczel have been tasked with recovering an asset from the galleon Caranton Hill, due in from St. Barothain. That asset turns out to be a human being, a man named Alabeus who arrives secreted within a coil of rope, but they're not the only people seeking him. They're mugged by an ōg and Tanczel killed; Alabeus is stolen but Ferec retrieves him again and we suddenly realise we have an inordinate amount of questions. We're only two chapters in and I was completely hooked, both by the story and the worldbuilding.

I had little idea at this point of where the story was going, though I was already on board for the duration. However, the worldbuilding, as early as this is, was already impressive. It's not that it's deep, though it is. It's in how it's deep. It feels effortless, though of course it isn't and Mohamed's craft is strong enough to hide the effort. She doesn't seem to hurl out pages of description so we can imagine the city down to its potholes, even when she's kind of doing just that. That's why this novel feels incredibly rich without being a doorstop that requires either an e-book reader or an aching wrist. That said, there are interludes here, where individual characters infodump through monologue while their companions are busy doing something else, but they're never boring.

Instead, she details subtly in a wealth of directions. She uses all five senses, for one, which so few writers manage. Whichever sense is dominant for you, she has you covered. She deepens through culture, as Christopher Buehlman did in 'The Blacktongue Thief'; it doesn't matter that there are a different number of hells depending on which sect you belong to, five or nine, but it says a heck of a lot about a city that has such a delineation. And she uses tiny details to explore bigger ones, like explaining architecture by having a bullet fall out of a calendar. This is how Katherine Addison detailed the city of Amalo and it's becoming my favourite approach.

We soon learn that Ferec works for a manticore called Bardanes at Seaborne, some sort of secret agency in Wickhills. He's at once what we expect a spy working in this city to be and also one who's especially good at his job because he doesn't follow all the rules as they're written. He has secrets that he keeps from his employers, usually a red flag but here one that Bardanes is happy to look past, presumably knowing more than he's letting on. Ferec feels like a capable character we could trust, but also one we wouldn't want to learn too much about. That's a neat balancing act for an author to follow. Few lead characters are this deep.

The asset is Alabeus of the Dossvern family, a scientist apparently defecting over to Wickhills with a mysterious key that he apparently lost during his arrival. When we visit St. Barothain, we learn that it's become an oppressive society, initially very Soviet to apply a framework of Cold War era espionage onto this fantasy setting but later with perhaps a touch of North Korean too. Tellingly, there only humans in St. Barothain, while Wickhills boasts a smörgåsbord of species, including an assortment Mohamed may have invented, like ōg, taiq and griffig, not to ignore a trained ground falcon. Others are more familiar, like wyrms, manticore and vampyr.

Of course, Ferec is now tasked with retrieving the key and then keeping it and its owner safe. We know from the opening ambush that this won't be a trivial task but it becomes more complicated with each successive chapter. Accordingly, he acquires a new partner: Agent Hoepsachett, whose work in Records Management he admires but who isn't typically placed into the field. She proves she's able if not always in the usual ways. I liked her a lot and wonder why she hadn't been given a serious opportunity like this before.

Then he's assigned Stangl and Maaz, the former experienced but the latter merely a year into the job. Eventually, Velasco becomes part of the team because he's Watch and caught up in this from a different angle that leaves his position untenable; the ramifications of this situation spiral up the chain of command and threaten to change everything. After we visit the Low, a city under the city, the Indigo King assigns the vampyr Cazanave and a fifteen-year-old thief called Augustine but who goes by Gus. All these characters are suitably different and bring something unique to the table.

If you've ever read espionage thrillers, then you know some of what's coming, even if only in the vaguest sense. We'll learn a lot more about the MacGuffin and it'll only grow in importance. The players often have their own agendas and not all of them are to be trusted. Some are there with the intention of betrayal. Then again, an accomplished spy like Ferec who's managed to remain a player for much longer than is typical know all this and more besides and so takes the appropriate precautions. There's a tangled web being woven and he doesn't want to find himself in the middle when the giant spider decides on lunch. That's metaphorical, I should add. It would be easy to see that happening literally here.

What's more, every twist and turn takes us deeper into the city of Wickhills, both metaphorically and literally. We learn about all the things that made Wickhills what it is, including some that are new to Ferec and, quite frankly, anyone else with a lifespan shorter than a manticore's. This is not a trivial city. This is a city that enforces itself as a character early, shows us soon after that that it isn't unwilling to reconfigure a detail here or there if it feels the need and continues to grow as a character past any point we might expect it to stop. I want to take the Wickhills tour, not only so I can visit the Museum of Dynamic Curiosities, if not perhaps Wellip Alley.

By the time we're done, Mohamed has taken a story about a MacGuffin and woven a tale around it of a world, even if we only ever visit one other city in flashback. This is one of those books that I wouldn't mind reading again in a year or so when the details have started to blur but not so much that I won't remember where everything's going. I have a feeling like it'll play a little differently, perhaps like a visit to an old friend in a town I used to live in and knew backwards, but see with an outsider's eye now in need of the guidance of a local like Ferec. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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