The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

This review was first published on Kurt's Frontier. Synopsis: Thaniel Steepleton is a Morse code operator at the Home Office in London in 1883. He lives a reasonably quiet life trying to support his widowed sister’s family. This is a time of civil unrest in the British Empire. Irish nationalists are agitating for independence, with some factions willing to resort to terrorism. One day, Thaniel returns home to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. Six months later, a bomb goes off, destroying Scotland Yard. The mysterious watch sounds an alarm that saves his life. He finds the watchmaker is one Keita Mori, a lonely, eccentric immigrant from Japan. The two strike up a friendship, but a chain of unexplainable events suggests something sinister is afoot. Then, Thaniel becomes engaged to a young woman named Grace Carrow, who is studying physics at Oxford. When she suspects Mori is at the center of these events, Thaniel finds his allegiances torn. Review: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is written along the lines of steampunk but focusses more on the clockwork end of things. We see fantastic watches, clockwork birds, even a clockwork octopus that takes things that don’t belong to it. The story blends historical events into a fantastic world. Unfortunately, the author does a bit of time jumping, which disturbs the forward momentum, and the storytelling is a bit disjointed in places. The pace of the story slows towards the end, before the final crisis point where it does pick up. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a story with a lot of unrealized potential.