goberiko
Synopsis
The Mystery of the Pantelegraph is the first investigation by the brilliant and unpredictable Mary Everest, a detective and cyclist living in a steampunk Victorian London, where Babbage's Analytical Engine became an industrial reality. One day the nephew of Alexander Bain, the Scottish inventor, comes into Study Everest, which is almost in scarlet... Giovanni Caselli, the Italian inventor of pantelegraph, who was expected to come to London some days before, had disappeared! Mary and her assistant Sheena has to rescue Caselli and discover who wants that his pantelegraph has no success at all.
Excerpt
London, 1871. An alternative past. A young woman, almost twenty, was going back upstairs out of the pneumatic metro, Baker street stop. It was the first fully functioning underground train of the world without a puff.
The pneumatic metro was a tecnological wonder: people, put into huge crafts with seatbelts, were sent through a network of serpentine tubes carved in Underlondon. Londoners were enthusiastic. It was clean, and fast. So, they started to call the metro "the tube" in informal talking.
Sheena (so was called the young woman of Indian origins) came in the early morning at King's Cross railway station, where she take the tube. Thanks to the pneumatic metro she saved an hour of her usual trip from home to work. In that very moment she was buying a copy of Times from a paperboy.
