The Lost Plot
By Genevieve Cogman.
Word has got out that a Librarian is doing some work for a dragon who’s in a competition to get promoted in the court of the Queen of the Southern Lands. Irene and Kai are sent to the New York on a world where it’s the 1920s. No matter what Irene and Kai do, they constantly end up in hot water (think of the Warren Beatty film with the Parallax Corporation).
It turns out that the Librarian, Evariste, has been blackmailed because Qing Song, one of the candidates for the post at court, is holding his daughter hostage.
Eventually the gangsters and the police have to join forces with Irene and Kai to subdue Qing Song and Jin Zhi because they start fighting each other. They’re all escorted to the Queen of the Southern Land, and in her presence, the truth is revealed, but this involves Kai resigning as an apprentice with the Library. Qing Song takes the honourable way out, but his man, Hu, shoots Irene, who just manages to avoid being killed.
Irene recovers and head back to the world where she’s based to find that Kai has moved out; only her scaly boy is there. He may have left the Library, but he hasn’t left her life.
I thought this book got bogged down a bit because no matter what Irene and Kai did, the police, gangsters and dragons were always one step ahead of them, placing them in situations from which there was no real chance of escape. A resolution was only effected because Qing Song and Jin Zhi started having a fight.
Previous volumes in this series (as far as I can recall) have been much more Indiana Jones, but this ended like an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey.
There were yet more ghastly Americanisms which are all right if an American character uses them, but otherwise not proper English.
Overall, this is a two-star kind of tale, not terrible, but the sort of storyline where the author digs down and keeps digging until some Act of God (or dragon) rescues a hopeless situation. And when I think about it, the plot does rather get lost in a lot of static tableaux.