Name: The Chemickal Marriage
Rating: 3.88 (872 reviews)
Author: Gordon Dahlquist

The Janus Affair

★ 4.06

Pip Ballantine

Certainly no strangers to peculiar occurrences, agents Wellington Books and Eliza Braun are nonetheless stunned to observe a fellow passenger aboard Britain's latest hypersteam train suddenly vanish in a dazzling bolt of lightning. They soon discover this is not the only such disappearance - every case inexplicably unexamined by the Crown.

Angelmaker

★ 3.93

Nick Harkaway

From the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World, blistering gangster noir meets howling absurdist comedy as the forces of good square off against the forces of evil, and only an unassuming clockwork repairman and an octogenarian former superspy can save the world from total destruction.
Joe Spork spends his days fixing antique clocks. The son of infamous London criminal Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, he has turned his back on his family’s mobster history and aims to live a quiet life. That orderly existence is suddenly upended when Joe activates a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism. His client, Edie Banister, is more than the kindly old lady she appears to be—she’s a retired international secret agent. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the British government and a diabolical South Asian dictator who is also Edie’s old arch-nemesis. On the upside, Joe’s got a girl: a bold receptionist named Polly whose smarts, savvy and sex appeal may be just what he needs. With Joe’s once-quiet world suddenly overrun by mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago and pick up his father’s old gun...

Break the Chains

★ 3.84

Megan E. O'Keefe

As the city that produces the most selium - that precious gas that elevates airships and powers strange magic - Hond Steading is a jewel worth stealing. To shore up the city's defenses, Detan promises his aunt that he'll recover Nouli, the infamous engineer who built the century gates that protect the imperial capital of Valathea. But Nouli is imprisoned on the Remnant Isles, an impervious island prison run by the empire, and it's Detan's fault. Detan doesn't dare approach Nouli himself, so his companions volunteer to get themselves locked up to make contact with Nouli and convince him to help. Now Detan has to break them all out of prison, and he's going to need the help of a half-mad doppel to do it.

The Dark Volume

★ 3.63

Gordon Dahlquist

Awakening from a fevered delirium, Celeste Temple finds herself in a fishing village on the remote Iron Coast. She has no idea where her companions, Cardinal Chang and Doctor Svenson, might be—nor whether any of her enemies survived the dirigible crash that marked her last conscious moment. And while her body seems intact, she cannot say the same for her mind. For she must contend not only with the possibility that peril awaits her but with the memory of her traitorous fiancé’s murder at sea…along with thousands of other memories that now live within her—courtesy of a bewitching glass book.

Hunted by murderous opportunists and cruel mercenaries of every kind, Miss Temple, Chang, and the Doctor are soon propelled into a quest that will draw them one by one into a realm of reckless, lawless terror. At every turn lies another enigma—and the stench of indigo clay, the raw material used to enslave even the most steadfast soul. Now they alone stand in the path of a diabolical conspiracy involving the books—one that will mean an alarming new world where once-free-roaming minds are wiped completely clean… if they live long enough. As Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang and Dr. Svenson uncover the devilish schemes of their deadly enemies, the terrifying secrets contained in The Dark Volume will be revealed one by one. For the blue glass is more lethal than they’d ever imagined—and those who possess it, as well as those who pursue it, are playing with fire.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

★ 3.50

Gordon Dahlquist

It began with a simple note: a letter of rejection from Miss Temple’s fiancé, written on crisp Ministry paper and delivered on her maid’s silver tray. But for Miss Temple, Roger Bascombe’s cruel rejection will ignite a harrowing quest for answers, plunging her into a mystery as dizzying as a hall of mirrors—and a remote estate where danger abounds and all inhibitions are stripped bare.

Nothing could have prepared Miss Temple for where her pursuit of Roger Bascombe would take her—or for the shocking things she would find behind the closed doors of forbidding Harschmort Manor: men and women in provocative disguise, acts of licentiousness and violence, heroism and awakening. But she will also find two allies: Cardinal Chang, a brutal assassin with the heart of a poet, and a royal doctor named Svenson, at once fumbling and heroic—both of whom, like her, lost someone at Harschmort Manor. As the unlikely trio search for answers—hurtling them from elegant brothels to gaslit alleyways to shocking moments of self-discovery-- they are confronted by puzzles within puzzles. And the closer they get to the truth, the more their lives are in danger. For the conspiracy they face—an astonishing alchemy of science, perverted religion, and lust for power—is so terrifying as to be beyond belief.

The Nine

★ 3.98

Tracy Townsend

In the dark streets of Corma exists a book that writes itself, a book that some would kill for...

Black market courier Rowena Downshire is just trying to pay her mother’s freedom from debtor's prison when an urgent and unexpected delivery leads her face to face with a creature out of nightmares. Rowena escapes with her life, but the strange book she was ordered to deliver is stolen.

The Alchemist knows things few men have lived to tell about, and when Rowena shows up on his doorstep, frightened and empty-handed, he knows better than to turn her away. What he discovers leads him to ask for help from the last man he wants to see—the former mercenary, Anselm Meteron.

Across town, Reverend Phillip Chalmers awakes in a cell, bloodied and bruised, facing a creature twice his size. Translating the stolen book may be his only hope for survival; however, he soon realizes the book may be a fabled text written by the Creator Himself, tracking the nine human subjects of His Grand Experiment. In the wrong hands, it could mean the end of humanity.

Rowena and her companions become the target of conspirators who seek to use the book for their own ends. But how can this unlikely team be sure who the enemy is when they can barely trust each other? And what will happen when the book reveals a secret no human was meant to know?

Dawn’s Early Light

★ 3.94

Pip Ballantine

Even helped by two American agents from the Office of the Supernatural and the Metaphysical, Braun and Books are challenged. Chief suspect in a rash of nautical and aerial disasters is Thomas Edison. Fantastic electric machines of Edison, eccentricities of consultant Nikola Tesla, and mysterious machinations of the Maestro, all bring danger.

The Rise of the Iron Moon

★ 3.77

Stephen Hunt

From the author of The Court of the Air and The Kingdom Beyond the Waves comes a thrilling new adventure set in the same Victorian-style world. Perfect for fans of Philip Pullman and Susanna Clarke. Born into captivity as a product of the Royal Breeding House, friendless orphan Purity Drake suddenly finds herself on the run with a foreign vagrant from the North after accidentally killing one of her guards. Her strange rescuer claims he is on the run himself from terrible forces who mean to enslave the Kingdom of Jackals as they conquered his own nation. Purity doubts his story, until reports begin to filter through from Jackals' neighbours of the terrible Army of Shadows, marching across the continent and sweepign all before them. But there's more to Purity than meets the eye. As Jackals girds itself for war against an army of near-unkillable beasts serving an ancient evil with a terrible secret, it soon becomes clear that their only hope is a strange little royalist girl and the last, desperate plan of an escaped slave.

The Chemickal Marriage

Books similar to The Chemickal Marriage