INFERNAL DEVICES
Book Three of The Hungry City Chronicles
Philip Reeve
Eos/HarperCollins
Science Fiction/Fantasy
ISBN-10: 0060826371
ISBN-13: 9780060826376
448 pages

• Read an Excerpt

It is nearly 20 years since the city of Anchorage skated across the ice to become a stationary settlement in the Dead Continent. Tom and Hester have settled into a peaceful life raising their daughter Wren away from the city-eat-city world of Municipal Darwinism. But life is a little too stationary for Wren, who longs for the adventures her parents had as aviators. When thieves arrive at her remote settlement looking for the mysterious Tin Book, Wren senses an opportunity for escape. Planning to trade the book for passage to Europe, she is kidnapped instead and sold into slavery.

INFERNAL DEVICES plunges readers back into Philip Reeve's brutal and imaginative world that began in MORTAL ENGINES and was last glimpsed in PREDATOR'S GOLD. Tom and Hester are middle-aged now, unprepared for the changes 20 years has made in a world they once knew. The conflict between traction cities and the Anti-Traction League has escalated into a war that has deeply eroded the landscape and people's lives. The war has increasingly come to depend on cannon fodder provided by corporate slave trade and on Stalkers, powerful fighting machines made out of the bodies of the dead.

While Wren tries to adapt to her new life as a slave in the household of the profiteering Professor Pennyroyal, her parents, Tom and Hester, find themselves confronted by a past they thought they'd left behind. Hester's betrayal of Anchorage, unknown on the Dead Continent, is the stuff of legend in the Hunting Grounds, and she is reunited with the Stalker Grike who has been resurrected for nefarious purposes.

Joining the cast of familiar characters are some new additions, including several new members of The Lost Boys, a guild of underwater orphan thieves, and Theo, a surviving member of the Green Storm's squad of suicide bombers. Perhaps most intriguing is Dr. Oenone Zero, a brilliant scientist whose groundbreaking work on Stalkers puts her in an ideal position to assassinate the most powerful leader in the Anti-Traction League.

With its breakneck pace and wrenching plot twists, INFERNAL DEVICES ends on a cliffhanger that will have readers hungry for A DARKLING PLAIN, Reeve's fourth and final installment in the series. It is so entertaining that it's easy to miss some of the more serious subtext. It's interesting that in a conflict so ideologically polarized, neither Tom, Hester, nor their daughter Wren have made a political stance. The true enemy in INFERNAL DEVICES is war itself, and the damage that the selfishness and greed of individuals can wreak on an entire planet. The Old Tech that both sides of the conflict are eager to acquire is clearly nuclear weaponry from our time, and threatens their world in the same way it threatens our own.

   --- Reviewed by Sarah A. Wood

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