Title: Wicked Gentlemen
Author: Ginn Hale
Year of publication: 2007
Genre: Steampunk romance
My rating: 4.5 stars or A-

I pick my way through relatively little-known books in the hope of finding gems like this one. Wicked Gentlemen is two novellas that work as one. In the first, Mr Sykes and the Firefly, we are introduced in the first person to narrator Belimai Sykes, who is a Prodigal, descendant of fallen angels who came out of hell three hundred ago for redemption on Earth. He’s a bit of a tortured soul (literally), what with his addiction to ophorium and his self-destructive tendencies. Then he’s hired to find a missing high-society wife by her husband, and more importantly, her brother, Captain William Harper of the Inquisition, the religious-based police force. In the course of solving the mystery, Belimai and Harper become prickly ‘drunk fuck’ lovers.

The second novella, Captain Harper and the Sixty Second Circle, picks up about two months after the first, Read the rest of this entry »