Review: Like Clockwork by Bonnie Dee

Review by Chronic Betty

Victoria's work with automatons has gained her renown and changed the face of London. But her concern that the clockworks are taking too many jobs away from humans, creating social unrest, is ignored. Given the ugly mood of the underclass, she fears more outbreaks of violence similar to the murder spree of the notorious Southwark Slasher.

Dash, unemployed thanks to the clockworks, has pledged fealty to The Brotherhood, a group determined to bring about the downfall of the automatons by any means necessary. His plan to kidnap Victoria goes awry when the unorthodox scientist pledges her assistance to their cause.

Despite their opposite social classes, a bond grows between them, and Victoria begins to feel emotions she never expected for the passionate Dash. But when the Slasher strikes close to home, Dash and Victoria realize that the boundaries of polite society are far from the only threat to their happiness...


I was really psyched to read this one.  I read another one of Dee's Carina titles last summer, Jungle Heat, and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Throw in some steampunk, and I'm there!  I was a little disappointed when I found out that this was a novella, because they generally aren't my favorite.  But I decided to give this one a go.


This was a very crowded story.  We've got steampunk, we've got civil unrest, we've got a kidnapping, we've got a nefarious government agency, and a Jack the Ripper-like serial killer on the loose.  Then we've got the lovers, two people who've never met each other before and have to overcome significant class differences to get to their happy ending.  All in just under 90 pages.  That's a lot of ground to cover.  One of the biggest plot points isn't even resolved on screen; we just hear about it later.


With all the other stuff going on, there just wasn't time for the romance to develop.  There were some nice moments in the middle of the story between Victoria and Dash, but the beginning just wasn't believable.  He kidnaps her, and within an few hours she's totally on his side.  (So, OK, politically she was pretty much on his side to begin with.  But I'm sorry, I don't care how much we agree philosophically, it's going to take more than a few hours to get over the desire to scream and bash my kidnapper over the head with my handbag.  I'm not going to invite him in for a drink and let him kiss me.)  And then we skip forward five months for the epilogue and the happy ending.


If there's going to be this much story in my story, it really needs to be about three times the page length.  Barring that, I would have liked to see Victoria and Dash's romance play out more naturally on the page, with some of the other threads left to be picked up in another book.  This could have been an excellent introduction to a new world and a new series, but I see nothing on the author's website about any planned follow up books.  There's certainly enough going on here, enough not satisfactorily resolved, to support more than a 90 page novella. 


There were positives.  I liked the premise, and I liked Victoria and Dash, as much as I got to know them.  It wasn't a total dud.  I just wish there had been enough breathing room for the positives to really develop.

While it's an A for creativity and story building, I have to give this one a D for execution.  It was a very interesting idea, but it's too much story shoehorned into too few pages.  


I picked this one up as a promotional freebie from Harlequin.