Donald Maass Literary Agency

Locus: I didn’t know that I needed another book about Karen Memery, the main character in Elizabeth Bear’s take on steampunk (Restoration-era Northwestern U.S. flavor) that launched in 2015 with Karen Memory and was followed up by Stone Mad in 2018. Those rain-soaked, gear-full days feel like a hazy moment when we all wondered if we should be investing in goggles and corsets for a much more whimsical future. Here we are, ten years on. Is there still a place for a story about a former teenage sex worker with moxie and smarts who uses both to right wrongs and solve crimes?

Oh yes there is a place. Bear shows us. Angel Maker picks up where Memery’s story left off in Stone Mad, with Karen and Priya out of the business and carving out a life in the countryside. But Bear herself isn’t stuck in their past. The seven years between books two and three has deepened her voice as a writer and added resonance to the relationships between the characters and within themselves.

The movie business has come to Rapid City, and Karen finds herself the stunt double for a trick-shootin’ gal who Bear sets up as an Annie Oakley analogue in this world. Priya finds work with the crew, too, and both see the extra income as an opportunity to get ahead. Then a double murder occurs, Priya is accused, and Karen is forced to clear her beloved’s name.

Bear gives you all you’d expect from a steampunk Western on a movie set. There is a mechanical cowboy. There’s a horse no one can tame. There are divas and gold mines and Mad Scientists. Characters like Madame Damnable are still around, but have moved into new phases of their lives, too. A well-known Illinois lawyer shows up – but in a surprising kind of way that makes total sense in this world.

But Angel Maker is really a book about relationships, both romantic and non. It’s about how we interact with each other as humans, told in Karen’s poetically blunt voice:

‘‘You got to be who you got to be, and you got to not be who you ain’t, and somehow you got to bend that around the person your lover needs you to be and that person, too – at least acceptably well – and you got to make room for your lover to be who they is while still not giving up your own self, and it ain’t half a wonder we don’t all live in caves and meet once a year to trade hides and salt and onions.’’

Bear salts these nuggets of wisdom throughout Angel Maker’s brisk plot and is clearly having great fun doing so. It’s contagious, that joy, and I’m glad Bear revisited this particular world of hers seven years on.