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.

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