Beauty and the Clockwork Beast by Nancy Campbell Allen

Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld

A Victorian era steampunk/paranormal story, Beauty and the Clockwork Beast is the first in a projected series from this new-to-me-author, and while it was an enjoyable listen, I can’t say that it breaks any new ground. The story is a fairly predictable one, and while the author has peppered the text with things like “telescribers” (which I imagine are mobile phones or tablets), “tons” (short for automatons which are programmed by means of metal punched-cards), steam-powered airships and ray guns; and thrown in a few vampires and shape-shifters for good measure, I never felt as though I was in a fully-defined and alternative world. There’s a nicely gothic feel to the story overall, but really, this is just Victorian England with a few extras bolted on.

Lucy Pickett has gone to stay with her cousin Kate at Blackwell Manor. Kate is newly and happily married to Jonathan Blake, younger brother of the Earl of Blackwell, but she has been unwell for some time, and Lucy is concerned about her. Lucy works for the Botanical Aid Society and is an expert on plants and herbs and their medicinal – and other – qualities. She is a botanist of some renown and one of a small number of people working on a top-secret project to develop something to combat Vampyric Assimilation Aid, a drug which enables vampires to move around in daylight and blend in with the normal population, making them even more dangerous than they already are. Lucy hopes that she will be able to find out what is wrong with Kate and help her to regain her health.

Noticeable by his absence from the manor is the earl himself, Miles Blake, a man with a reputation for ill-temper, dark moods and closely kept secrets. He is a widower – his wife died in suspicious circumstances, and her death was followed a day later by the death of his sister, Marie, whose battered body indicated she had been the victim of a terrifying attack. Rumour would have it that the earl was somehow involved in their deaths, but nobody knows anything for sure, and the taciturn lord does little to refute the gossip. It’s apparent to Lucy that all is not as it seems, and she is quickly intrigued by Miles, who is a handsome, commanding figure; enigmatic and determined to remain aloof.

But his ability to do so is challenged when Lucy tells him that she has been unnerved by the appearance of the spirit of his dead sister, who appears to be trying to communicate something to her, or to them. From then on in, Miles and Lucy join forces to try to work out why Marie is haunting them and who is trying to harm Kate, and why.

With a relatively small cast of characters and not too many of those likely suspects, it’s not very difficult to work out the likely perpetrator, but for all its predictability, I enjoyed the story. Lucy is an engaging heroine – smart, brave but not above admitting when she needs help, although there are one or two times towards the end of the story when she takes things into her own hands once too often and ends up in very perilous situations. Miles is one of those darkly brooding heroes whose closely guarded secret means that he can never have a normal life – or so he thinks. I did have to roll my eyes at the part where Lucy reassures him that isn’t the case by telling him things I found it hard to believe he didn’t already know. It was a bit too convenient a solution and info-dump-y, and Miles too quickly accepts what she tells him over a lifetime of knowledge and experience that taught him something else.

The romance between Lucy and Miles is nicely done, though. There’s no insta-lust or repetitive mental-lusting; their relationship develops slowly, with Lucy turning to instinctively to Miles for help, gradually and gently dismantling the emotional walls he has put up to keep people out. The pair don’t go beyond kisses on the page, but there is a definite sense of strong attraction and some nicely simmering romantic tension between them.

This is the second time I have listened to Saskia Maarleveld, and she once again delivers a strong, polished performance. Narrative and dialogue are well-paced and expressive, and her character portrayals are all clearly delineated according to gender and station. She has a naturally husky voice in the mezzo-soprano range, and that huskiness, combined with a slight drop in pitch works very well to portray the male characters. Miles sounds suitably masculine and attractive, and for the most part it’s easy to distinguish between him and his two friends, Sam and Oliver in the few scenes in which they appear together. Sam speaks a little faster and sounds more light-hearted while Oliver is given a slight lilt which I couldn’t quite place; I’m not sure if it was meant to be Scottish or Irish as it sounded like one and then the other at different times. However, in scenes where only one of them appears, it wasn’t always so easy to tell who it was straight away and at those points, I had to rely on the dialogue tags. The female characters are well portrayed, too, with Lucy sounding appropriately youthful but still confident and practical, while Miles’ cousin Candis sounds slightly more girlish. His awful aunt Eustace is given an unpleasant, nasal tone that immediately tells the listener she’s not a nice woman, and the various servants and bit players are all neatly distinguishable from the main cast.

My principal criticism of the narration is that Ms. Maarleveld sometimes tends to add almost another syllable to the ends of words, so that, for example, a word like “window” becomes “window-ah”. Writing it like that is slightly exaggerated, but that’s the nearest I can come to describing it in print! Otherwise, though, it’s a strong narration that really brings the story to life, and, I suspect, went a long way towards enabling me to overlook some of the more predictable aspects of the story and which contributed firmly towards my enjoyment of the audiobook as a whole.

Beauty and the Clockwork Beast is perhaps not an audiobook I’ll revisit in the near future, but I might keep an eye out for the next in the series.

[section label=’Audiobook Information’ anchor=’Audiobook Information’]

Caz

AUDIOBOOK INFORMATION

TITLE: Beauty and the Clockwork Beast

AUTHOR: Nancy Campbell Allen

NARRATED BY: Saskia Maarleveld

GENRE: Paranormal Romance/Steampunk

STEAM FACTOR: You can play it out loud

REVIEWER: Caz [button type=’link’ link=’http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01JGWB5I8/?tag=audiogalsnet-20′ size=’btn-lg’ variation=’btn-default’ target=’blank’]Buy Beauty and the Clockwork Beast by Nancy Campbell Allen on Amazon[/button]