The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

by Gordon Dahlquist

Bantam, 760 pp, $26.00

Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is Mr. Dahlquist’s debut novel.

Miss Temple receives a letter from her fiancé breaking off their engagement with no reason given. Miss Temple wants to know why. So she trails him to isolated Harschmort Manor, a forbidding estate at the end of the railway. She sneaks in wearing a disguise, but nothing could prepare an adventure seeking Victorian maiden for the bizarre and deadly game she becomes embroiled in. But she finds two allies, Cardinal Chang, a brutal assassin with the soul of a poet, and Dr. Swenson, fumbling, heroic, and sometimes brilliant. They have both lost someone to the plot. The closer they get to the truth, the more they are endangered. The conspiracy is beyond belief; a morass of perverted science, religion and lust for power.

It is a disturbing dark fantasy on a Victorian mystery base that rockets from crisis to crisis through a world that is, by turns, seductive, brutal, and at times tender, even romantic. Her three protagonists involve you in the story to the last page. You won’t want to put it down. A Fourth of July fireworks of a debut. I’m looking forward to the next novel. - Pam Allan