Previously Sir Richard Burton, special agent to the Throne of England, had come to the realization that many cornerstones of his 1860s London - grand advances in genetics and technology - were in fact due to a meddlesome time traveler who has set the current world spinning into a new, uncertain future.  Made intimately aware that his own destiny has been forever altered, Burton now acts to sniff out the conspiracies and threats to England emerging from the unseemly underbelly of the Empire and beyond.  If you have not read "The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack," you must do so before embarking on the second book.  I say so primarily because the first book is a wonderfully great read and secondarily because without it, you will spend far too much time trying to understand the setting of the second installment.  Hodder attempts to condense his own explanations, but please trust that it is much more rewarding to read the first novel first and follow appropriately with this second work.

In this second book of Burton & Swinburne's adventures, our heroes find themselves fairly awash in various mysteries starting with the automaton of the title, "The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man."  Stolen mystical gems, a rioting of the lower classes,  strange wraiths walking about in the fog,  a grotesque pretender to an important estate and a host of other concerns have Burton and Swinburne running nearly non-stop through a sprawling geography of urban and rural locations trying to untangle it all and make sense of any of it.  Thank goodness for rotochairs and kite-swans!

While answers are forthcoming and the action tries valiantly to lead us along, the story's focus suffers slightly for not having a clear-cut adversary in the same vein as Spring-Heeled Jack to chase about, but as far as second outings go, Hodder should be recognized for attempting to explode the scope of his altered history outward; It's not just London which has changed, but everywhere.  Instead of a potato famine, Ireland has become overrun with carnivorous plants.  America is faltering under dual siege of its civil war and the newly-displaced Irish arriving in the new world to forcibly carve out new colonies. The mysteries emerging from the latest string of crisis that Burton investigates threatens to throw England into chaos during a time the faltering empire can scarcely afford to lose focus.

New situations demand new characters and the supporting cast of the Burton-Swinburne adventures expands greatly, forcing me at times to go back and re-read certain passages just to make sure I was placing the correct besieged Bobby in the proper chapter.  This volume also brings back most of the cast from the first book including the Countess Sabina, a prognosticator who serves as Burton's oracle, and helps Hodder open up the door to quasi-supernatural elements of the story that befit a Steampunk novel of set in an era rich in occultism.  Sabina also plays a grand part in setting up for the next novel in which presumably Burton's actual past and his potential futures collide and hopefully provide him with some sense of closure from his tragic career as an African explorer.

Much of the second book is built on theme of "conflict during self-invention," from Babbage's clockwork man, to the pretender seeking the cursed Tichborne estate.  Swinburne struggles with his identity as a decadent dandy versus being an apprentice hero to Burton.  Entire political factions struggle with their place in the landscape of competing national concerns.  Even the poet Herbert Spencer (loved by the foul-mouthed messenger birds) find himself at odds with himself.  Burton's own soul-searching, well established in the first book, almost seems redundant, but since Burton is the only person with a crystalline understanding of what has happed to this point, his own conflict of identity (sometimes with his alternate-timeline self in moments of malarial fever) brings home the looming danger of the unresolved split in time.

While a very fine read in almost every aspect, it cannot be expected that the author meet the same fine explosion of "The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack."  This book fleshes out the existing characters and their places and gives depth to as many people as the pages can spare, all while setting the stage for things to come.  The price for this, for me, is that the pacing of the book was at times as slow as fog-bound train.  You know it's going somewhere, you just can't see the where of it, and you can't judge how fast you're moving or even if you like the direction.  Thankfully the destination does not disappoint, even if this is clearly a setting-up point that works to establish the various daggers and MacGuffins awaiting our heroes and villains before moving into the next grand chapter of the adventures of Burton and Swinburne, which we see arriving in "Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon" (due for release January 2012).

Be sure to read the author's appendix wherein he details the notable historical characters whom he has name-dropped throughout.  I find many of these entries amusing and revealing, and it never hurts to brush up on your obscure knowledge of "famous Victorians" just in case history goes suddenly askew.  Even without that unlikely event, you are not likely to find the likes of such in so nice a package elsewhere.

Professor Upsidasium is a contributor to Steampunk Chronicle.  He uses the Visuatronic Audiographic Steampunk Archive to capture images and sounds of events he has been to and individuals he has had the pleasure of speaking with.  You can follow his ramblings on Twitter or explore the current iteration of the archives on YouTube.