A
Midsummer Night’s Mechanical
Sensibility Grey, #3
by Kirsten Weiss
Date of
Publication: May 1st 2016
Publisher:
Misterio Press
Cover
Artist: Kirsten Weiss
Genre:
Steampunk Suspense
From The Book Junkie Reads . . . A Midsummer Night's Mechanical (Sensibility Grey , #4) . . .
Mystery, suspense, intrigue and a whole lotta what's coming next. Magical. Mechanical. Young Miss Sensibility has found herself in another adventure. This time she has decided to move East. She wants to see what can be found out there. Along the way she had her mishaps, mysteries, mayhem.
I found rich deep characters with Miss Sensibility Grey being my most favorite. She has spirit, spunk, and lots of gumption. She was a modern Miss in a non-modern time. There was a mix of historical, women's fiction, mystery, suspense, fantasy, adventure.
This read is most certainly a stand-alone but there are times that I wanted to put it down and seek out the other two books to get acquainted with her background. I look forward to reading more of Miss Sensibility Grey and her journey East. I first must go back to the beginning and learn of her coming to be in America and then her adventures in San Francisco before begin blamed for the burning of the bay.
**This ARC was provided
via Bewitching Book Tours in
exchange for an honest review.**
Sensibility Grey series:
Steam and Sensibility – Sensibility Grey, #1
Of Mice and Mechanicals – Sensibility Grey, #2
A Midsummer Night’s Mechanicals – Sensibility Grey, #3
BLURB
A
Midsummer Murder
The
California Territory, 1849
Blamed for burning down the San
Francisco wharf, clockwork inventor, Sensibility Grey has spent the last three
months in hiding. Now all she wants is to depart the gold-crazy boomtown for a
new life in the East. So when the owner of a traveling theater offers her work
embellishing his mechanical stage, she turns him down. Then he turns up dead on
her doorstep along with his enigmatic stage.
An explorer of the mysteries of
aether, Sensibility has her own secrets to keep, and adversaries who’ll stop at
nothing to learn them. Is the mechanical stage a part of a bigger game? Or the
key to unlocking her true, magical potential?
A
Midsummer Night’s Mechanical is book three in the Sensibility Grey series of
steampunk suspense.
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CHAPTER
ONE
San
Francisco, California Territory, June 1849.
Sensibility sat
cross-legged upon her bed and tried not to think. She tried not to think of the
ache where her stays pinched her back. She tried not to think of tomorrow’s
journey across the American wilderness. She tried not to think about the clamor
of banging drums and tootling fifes and—
“Oh, good gad!” She
clenched her fist, pieces of quartz crystal biting into her flesh. Sensibility
sprang from the bed and threw open the boarding house window. Oppressive heat,
acrid from the nearby outhouse, rolled into the room. Wrinkling her nose, she
leaned out over the fenced back yard and craned her neck. The afternoon sun
streamed through the laundry, hanging limp on the line. From her position, she
couldn’t see the street procession. But neither could she avoid hearing their
blasted parade.
Something scuttled
near her elbow, and she jerked away, slamming her head on the window frame.
White pain arced through her skull.
A baby raccoon, not
much larger than the palm of her hand, cowered on the other end of the narrow
sill. It scrabbled, hunching into a tight ball, trapped on the high ledge.
“Ow.” She winced,
rubbing her throbbing head and glad her chignon had taken the brunt of the
blow. “How on earth did you get up here?”
The raccoon mewled.
“You shall have to
make your own way home, for you cannot come inside. Mrs. Watson has a strict
rule about animals inside her boarding house.”
Gently, so as not to
disturb the creature, she shut the window. The raccoon peered over the ledge
then looked at her, his expression plaintive.
Attempting to ignore
the animal, she paced the denuded room, her brown skirts swishing.
They had ample space
to swish. Nearly all her belongings lay compressed into a single carpetbag, set
before the empty wardrobe. The bedroom had an air of abandonment.
Unsettled,
Sensibility rattled the quartz crystals in her hand and glanced to the window.
The animal stared
inside, forlorn.
She tugged at her
collar. It was such a small thing. But rules were rules. “You found your way
onto the ledge. You can find your own way down.”
Sensibility turned to
the journal open on the desk. Her sketch of an unworldly creature she’d once
encountered scowl from the page. Frowning, she slammed the book shut. It had
been careless of her to have left it open. Strange, she couldn’t remember
examining the journal before she’d gone downstairs to retrieve her luncheon.
The crystals pressed
into her palm. She was so close to a breakthrough in aether technology, but the
clues remained buried. Buried in the remains of her father’s last journal.
Hidden in a journal from a traveling occultist. Scattered throughout her own
notes and theories. One day soon, she would fit those pieces together. It was
madness to hope she could solve that problem today.
Sensibility opened
her hand and gazed at the quartz crystals. She’d mastered the use of aether to
power small devices. But aether had other applications, such as distance
control and distance vision. These applications eluded her. “There has to be a
way…”
She glanced at the
window.
The animal raised
itself on its hind legs and pressed its tiny black paws to the glass.
Sensibility groaned.
“I know I’ll regret this.” Pocketing the crystals, she opened the window.
The raccoon cowered.
“You,” she said,
“being a wild animal, will attempt to bite me if I rescue you. But I will have
none of it. I shall pick you up, I shall take you outside, and you shall
neither bite nor scratch. Do you understand?”
In a swift motion,
she grasped it by the scruff of the neck and lifted it inside. It writhed, and
her grasp on it loosened.
She gasped. “Don’t….”
The raccoon dropped
to her desk and shook its head. Whiskers twitching, it scuttled to her abandoned
luncheon tray and made free with a bit of toast.
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Author
Info
Kirsten Weiss worked overseas for
nearly fourteen years, in the fringes of the former USSR and in South-east
Asia. Her experiences abroad sparked an
interest in the effects of mysticism and mythology, and how both are woven into
our daily lives.
Now based in San Mateo, CA, she writes
steampunk suspense and paranormal mysteries, blending her experiences and
imagination to create a vivid world of magic and mayhem. Kirsten has never met
a dessert she didn’t like, and her guilty pleasures are watching Ghost
Whisperer re-runs and drinking red wine.
Sign up for her newsletter to get a
free copy of the full length urban fantasy novel, The Alchemical Detective, and
updates on her latest work at: http://kirstenweiss.com
Author Links:
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