Be like the Egyptians (walk like them if you want). Investigate, and get wrapped up in your work, along with Queen Victoria’s top agents, Sir Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes. Learn how the Egyptians tried to extend life indefinitely by rites and rituals attributed to the god Osiris. And, track down a rogue agent, half-man, half-machine, just returned from years living undercover in Russia. It’s easy enough to pick up his trail: he’d be the one who smells of rotting flesh. These two cases, along with one Veronica takes on involving a villainous magician and doctor with a taste for murdering young women, add up to a suspenseful page-turning novel that’ll keep you reading until late into the night. The Osiris Ritual is George Mann’s second installment in his Newbury & Hobbes Investigations series, combining the Supernatural and Mystery genres.
Set in 1902, three months after the events of the first novel, The Osiris Ritual starts off with the opening of a unique Egyptian sarcophagus with a mummy inside that is highly unusual: its eyes were stitched shut, and the mouth is “wide open in a silent, millennia-long scream.” As much as the strange mummy intrigues Newbury, he cannot dwell on it because he was asked by the Queen to meet the agent William Ashford, who is perhaps more machine than human thanks to a bizarre mutilation by his predecessor, Knox. Meanwhile, Veronica is handling a case of women who have gone missing. The only link seems to be that they all attended a magic show and volunteered for the Disappearing Lady trick. Her primary mission given to her by the Queen, however, is to watch over Newbury and try to make sure he doesn’t let the laudanum he takes and his involvement in the occult turn him into the same sort of person as Knox. Yet she can’t help but to identify with the missing women and want to prevent any more women from becoming victims.
This splitting up of cases is one of the major ways The Osiris Ritual differs from the first novel in the series, The Affinity Bridge. For all of his Sherlock Holmes-like intellect, Newbury has only ever thought of Veronica as his assistant. It’s not until late in this novel that he gets the revelation that Veronica is also an agent. The two of them are attracted to each other, and Newbury has considered telling Veronica this, but hasn’t so far in the series. His learning of Veronica’s keeping the secret from him that she’s been, in effect, spying on him, no matter what the motive might be, causes him to wonder if he can trust her.
One loose end (I think of it as one, at any rate) from The Affinity Bridge continues in The Osiris Ritual. That is, zombie-like victims of a plague brought over from India, revenants, still roam the foggy streets of London, claiming victims. The revenants are a major part of The Affinity Bridge’s plot, and Newbury himself gets bitten by one of them and he is treated by Dr. Fabian. The plague doesn’t end in the first novel–it continues on in The Osiris Ritual–but it’s not a big part of the plot, and is only mentioned in passing. I found this kind of curious, and I wondered why the author didn’t either come up with some reason why the plague ended, or why it continues on. This loose end didn’t detract from the rest of George Mann’s excellent second novel in the series for me, but it is something I kept thinking might be resolved by the conclusion of The Osiris Ritual, though it never was–perhaps Mann is planning on taking this up again and making it an important part of the plot of the third novel in his series.
The Osiris Ritual is a heart-pounding, adrenaline-inducing combination of the Steampunk and detective genres, the twisted but ultra-cool result of a literary genetic experiment gone wild. Maybe a good name for this hybrid might be Holmes-punk (hyphenated to be sure one takes care in dividing the syllables when it’s pronounced out loud). George Mann is a worthy successor to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and fans of Steampunk and page-turning thrillers should check out both this and The Affinity Bridge.
