The look and feel of the story fit well into the recent ongoing cinematic vogue for gothic Victoriana (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Prestige, Sherlock Holmes, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, etc.) but it's pretty badly written; if you really want the authentic edifice of syntactically complex Victorian prose, try Bulwer-Lytton, instead.I might give this another go, if ever I get back into striking a cane-sword wielding, becaped and laudanum-fuelled pose, but I somehow doubt it. ( )

I loved this book, and although I did think it was a little too long, and after reading some of the reviews here, I could understand why readers both loved, disliked or didn't even finish the book. It did take me a while to read the first chapter (but I was on holiday in Vegas at the time, so there were many other distractions!) as the text was quite small, and the author does go into alot of detail, describing the most mundane things.
However, I carried on through the next couple of chapters, immediately liking the Cardinal, and then when I got home off my holiday I really cracked on with it and couldn't put it down. Unlike others, I enjoyed the way that a chapter was dedicated to each character, and that when you found out what they had all been up to you could piece things together and fathom out why certain things had happened to each character, due to the actions of another.
As soon as I finished this book I investigated when the sequel, 'The Dark Volume', was released, and was in luck as it was being released within a couple of weeks. I immediately bought it (in hardback too, although more expensive, I had to have it!) and it took me just over a day to read.
I have since read the first (and second) book again, and enjoyed it just as much. When I was reading it for the first time, I couldn't help but imagine the book as a film and who would be in it, what the sets and costumes would be like, although due to the length and weaving of plots, I think the viewer would be quite confused.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book, it is 'my kind of book', although I do understand why others wouldn't like it. Like others, I bought the book due to the look of the cover and the intriguing title, and it is one of my most favourite impulse, Waterstones 3 for 2, buys! ( )

It took me about a day to get throught the first chapter, but by the third I was whizzing through about one an hour. Though it is confusing at the beginning as the three main characters know everyone by different aliases, once they are all together it is more understandable, though I think a second reading will make it clearer to me still.
The book starts with a mysterious masked ball which for different reasons is attended by the three main characters. Miss Temple is there following her ex-fiance,Cardinal is there as an assasin and Dr Svenson is there as part of the German prince's party.
As the book continues, they have to uncover the aims of a group of people have created a way of taking peoples memories and dreams and putting them into peices of glass.
There is plenty of mystery and intrigue and it is a very enjoyable book, as long as you don't give up straight away. ( )

A book which could have been so much better for a severe pruning at the editorial stage. Any interest I had in the tale was lost in the mire of words. ( )

in case you had not noticed, Harschmort is a house of masks and mirrors and lies, of unscrupulous, brutal advantage. We cannot afford illusion - about ourselves least of all, for this is what our enemies exploit most of all. I have seen notorious things, I promise you, and notorious things have been done to me.

A steampunk adventure in which three disparate people (a hired killer, a jilted woman, and a doctor whose job is to keep a dissolute prince out of trouble) come together to investigate a secret cabal. It was rather long and could easily have been edited to a more manageable length. In my opinion the reader doesn't really need to have the same time period covered in tortuous detail not once but three times (from the point of view of each of the protagonists). And just how many times did the baddies leave someone to kill one of the protagonists and assume they were dead, only to have them escape and pop up just as the baddies are gloating over their death? More times than your average James Bond movie, I reckon!

But I still enjoyed it, even though it took me well over a fortnight to slog my way through it. ( )