THUNDER CITY

In a long-awaited new Traction Era tale, a motley band of adventurers sets out to take a city back from a ruthless usurper.

Setting his tale between the timelines of the Fever Crumb series and the Mortal Engines Quartet, Reeve sends a band of unlikely underdogs up against fiendishly clever new dictator Gabriel Strega. Strega is bent on turning the formerly peaceful mobile town of Thorbury into a ravening urban predator with the help of a small army of mercenaries, a sinister pair of killers, and a squad of hulking cyborg Revenants. The author parades his appealing ensemble—led by genteel but steely tutor Lavinia Torpenhow, boozy ex-soldier Oddington Doom, and Tamzin Pook, a deceptively unprepossessing young gladiator of tantalizingly obscure origin—through a breakneck series of brushes with disaster in various locales, from blood-soaked arena sands to one of posh floating spa Bad Luftgarten’s literal Air B&Bs. He then pitches his cast into climactic hails of snapping bullets, titanic bot vs. bot battles, and fan-pleasing scenes of massive cities chowing down on one another. The famously rude waiters at the trendy Baguette Pneumatique bistro in mighty, peripatetic Paris and similar sly tweaks relieve the overall plot’s grimmer tendencies. Readers will wind up as exhausted as the cast, which, aside from a short encounter with members of the African Zagwan Empire and passing reference to the silk weavers of the eastern Shan Guo kingdom, largely presents white.

A rousing, swashbuckling, dystopian romp.