Too much divergence in too short a time to be plausible ( )

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“Black Chamber” is the first installment in an alternative history series positioned right before America’s entry in the Great War. I really enjoyed it and I am looking forward to the next in line!

Theodore Roosevelt has been elected president in 1912 and he is still at the White House in 1916. He has brought a lot of progress in the States ever since and has created a Secret service called Black Chamber. His secret service agents have intelligence of a great weapon being built in Germany that is expected to attack the States. Therefore he sends one of his best senior operatives to work it out.

Luz is a senior Black Chamber operative. She is a Cuban-American with friendly relations to President Roosevelt. She boards a flying vessel heading to Amsterdam with the task to portray as a Mexican revolutionario and cooperate with the Germans, in order to get more information on their plan. She gets in touch with the German contact and establishes her path there.

Stirling has done a great job creating an alternative Universe, where Kaiser Wilhelm is attacking both Europe and America with deadly weapons of mass distraction. The English and the French are really suffering under the Central Powers rage. It’s only the Americans that can help, but they haven’t yet engage in War.

Secret agent Luz is a marvelous character. She is a very capable woman. She is trained and strong and as good as any male operative would be. She is quite intelligent too. Luz can understand many things about a person based on their body language, their accent and their reactions to every situation.

The secondary characters are very well built as well. Ciara is a woman that understands mechanics and technology. She is quite rare for that period of time. Horst, on the other hand, is a very powerful man. He is strong and smart and very open minded. He admires the two ladies for their personalities and rare capabilities. That’s very honourable of the author, as it was a man’s world, as it still is in many cases. ( )

**Edited**

I had high hopes for Black Chamber - an alternate history set in World War I where Theodore Roosevelt has president. The idea alone had me excited. And Luz - the main protagonist - was a character I could get behind. A bi-sexual secret agent that could give James Bond and Jason Bourne a run for their money. Luz is smart, very skilled, quite dangerous, and - like Bond - gets the girl in the end. Luz makes a great character and the story is top notch. And Stirling delivers and met my expectations.

My biggest problem with Black Chamber has nothing to do with Stirling, but with the company that produced the audio CD that I listened to. The production was so bad that one CD was burned as a different disc, and an entire chapter - at the most critical point in the story - was left out. I listened to the CDs twice to make sure, and this poor editing led me to think that Stirling had left out the climactic ending of the book. (I should have known better.) I had an opportunity over the weekend to pick up a physical copy of the book to check whether what I heard on the CD was correct, or there was an error. To my pleasant surprise, it was the CD that was in error.

This is a fun book, with a great character. I would have like more TR, but I understand the direction Stirling took the story in, and I think Luz is a character that I can follow on more adventures. I do hope that some of the long, often times tedious, descriptions of everything about music, composers, literature, philosophy, and cooking (and everything in between) can be toned down some as the overly descriptive elements do slow down the pace of the narrative. (For a thriller the book has a languid pace at times). ( )

Teddy Roosevelt is elected president in this alternate world history. Early pages can be a slog as we work with the author's (demonstrating his linguistic erudition) constant and annoying insertion of bon mots in multiple languages.
But hang in there for this imaginative story; Germany's version of a sneak attack with nerve gas, no less. Our heroine Luz O'Malley Arostegui makes James Bond seem a trifling wimp. Perhaps, he could be a descendant but read on to find out how that might be unlikely. Trained in multiple martial arts, deadly with a knife and pitiless with a Thompson she leaves bodies wherever she passes by.

A good yarn and hopefully the start of an interesting series, after all, Horst may still be alive and dangerous. ( )

This book begins what I hope will be a long series of adventure in an alternate Great War with spies and advanced weapons and a thrill a minute. I was worried that with the "Change" series drawing to a close I would have no reason to look for the next S. M. Sterling release. I found the entire novel a non-stop thrill, with justified and detailed suspenseful segments that led to terrific and well described action. This was just the thing for end of summer distraction from our current political reality! ( )