The Affinity Bridge

A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation

By: George Mann

Narrated by: Simon Taylor

Length: 9 hrs

Publisher's summary

Get ready to follow dazzling young writer George Mann to a London unlike any you've ever seen and into an adventure you will never forget, in The Affinity Bridge.

Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by unfamiliar inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, while ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen, and journalists.

But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side. Queen Victoria is kept alive by a primitive life-support system, while her agents, Sir Maurice Newbury and his delectable assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, do battle with enemies of the crown, physical and supernatural.

This time Newbury and Hobbes are called to investigate the wreckage of a crashed airship and its missing automaton pilot, while attempting to solve a string of strangulations attributed to a mysterious glowing policeman, and dealing with a zombie plague that is ravaging the slums of the capital.

©2009 George Mann (P)2009 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Fast-paced and well-written, this novel is likely to appeal to genre fans." ( School Library Journal)

Ok story, bad reader

Would you try another book from George Mann and/or Simon Taylor?

I'm going to try another George Mann, I'll avoid Simon Taylor.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked Newberry. As a Sherlock he was ok, but it was hard to like him with the reader's too husky voice for him.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Simon Taylor?

Anyone would be better. His voice was so breathy it was hard to understand. He whispered the main character so husky that I had trouble understanding him.

Did The Affinity Bridge inspire you to do anything?

Make sure I don't buy another Simon Taylor book.

Any additional comments?

There was a disturbing pop pop pop sound and then a repeat in the reading. It happened twice. I am not sure what this was, but I deleted the book and redownloaded it. The noise was still there. If I'm paying for the reading I would like it to sound nice. The first time it happened I thought I had missed something and rewound it, but it happened again.

Quite good first book

There were any number of reasons I enjoyed this book, and only a few dislikes. My first like is the narrator, Simon Taylor, who has the perfect voice for all of the characters in this book (especially Sir Maurice and, interesting, Miss Hobbes). The plot is a bit thick and tangled at times, something I'd put down to a first time author (but surprising in such a seasoned editor), but all in all it kept my attention.

Sir Maurice is a flawed character, but not aggressively so-a relief after reading Stacia Kane's Downside books featuring a junkie witch. But despite his elegance and good looks, he's a laudanum addict and that should be an interesting thread in future books.

I was definitely struck by the gentleness of the book, despite some blood and gore scenes featuring the revenants and the automatons. If you're looking for something thought-full, this is it.

thoroughly enjoyable

Great characters and world. A fun fast-paced story. I can't wait to continue on with the series.

Clockwork Britain

Basic clockwork universe book, set in an alternate Victorian England. Appealing protagonists. First of a series. Simon Taylor does an excellent job. Plot has a couple of elements which are hard to swallow, but overall, a very enjoyable "read." If Audible doesn't commission the next two books in the series, I'll be forced to buy them!

Please remove the flubs in the narration

Any additional comments?

At several points in the book, the narrator gets tongue tied, does a vocal exercise, and repeats lines. I understand his job requires a lot of work, but so does the editor's. Clean up the recording, folks! It's really distracting to hear this stuff.

Fan fiction?

Point 1. This is the single worst peice of fiction I have ever come across!
2. I really want my credit back!
3. This is the book
Sherlock Holmes fan fiction (name changed to sell it) with Dr. Watson as a girl.
+Sherlock holmes like drug use!
+zombies (no real story they are just there)
+Robot (also just kind of there)
+mad scientist
+zeppelins (Rigid airships)!!!! a Hindenburg like explosion! even though also not very well used as a story point!

I hated this book!
BOOOO

Boooo

booo
boo

Great Reader, Ameteur Writer and Horable Editer

Judging by the reviews this book is enjoyed by some and hated by others.
However, even the positive reviews, justify it on the basis that it is a first book. {Which it is NOT}.
In my opinion the reader was excellent! He had a great British accent, and did different voices for every character; unfortunately the material he had to work with was not expressive enough to fit his style of narration.
The story itself is a jumble of cliché’s crammed together into a mystery/occult/steampunk novel. But none of the clichés are fully developed so the whole story suffers. It is riddled with contradictions (Newberry is pinned as a rational Sherlock Holmes, who also believes in the occult?), Odd and contrived situations (the detectives persistently pursue criminals without bringing weapons and are often, "out gunned"), superfluous plots (Veronica's sister is in an asylum, because she can see the future, but her future predictions do not help solve the mystery), and inconsistencies (a feminist character who hardly ever fights).
Also, the pacing of the story is terrible. The internal timing of the story is so off kilter that it is often hard for the reader to tell whether it is morning, noon, or night, or if events have happened on the same day or days apart. Many chapters abruptly end with the characters giving up for the day in favor of dinner or lunch.
Finally, I counted at least 6 sound editing errors, where the narrator repeats himself, or it seems like a small piece of the story was missing.
The Text editor allowed Mann to make several plot errors, and the sound editor did a bad job putting the story back together. The reader was good, and the story was entertaining for all its flaws. If it were only $10 it would be worth it.

Slow, awkward and disappointing

The summary had sold me on an Victorian steam-punk world with zombie plagues, air ships, mechanical automatons and an artificially-life-extended queen. This book technically delivers all of those things and somehow still manages to be slow, uninteresting and poorly delivered.

The main character is ultimately the least interesting man in the world leading the most interesting life. Although attempts are made to add depth, the only three-dimensional character is the female lead, Veronica Hobbes, who manages to kick ass despite living in a heavily chauvinistic and chivalrous post-Victorian society. She's probably the only thing redeeming the book, and and she doesn't do enough.

The story itself fails to live up to its promise, with rushed action scenes mingling between unbearably slow, forced deduction scenes with seemingly no connection between them and even less sense tying in the overall story, despite the numerous cases of deus ex machina struggling to pull the plot together.

Perhaps most of these flaws could be overlooked were the narrator not dull and irritating. Although his accent was acceptably British, his voices varied only in degree of gravel being gargled while growling, and all shared the same insufferable breathiness that meant the whole book felt like it was wheezed out by a terminally bored lung cancer patient.

All in all I suffered through the whole book just because I was curious how they'd try to pull a conclusion out of this soggy, cardboard mess, and because I had no more credits to buy better books.

Let me experience be a warning - this is not worth the download.

The narrator makes the audiobook

I've never heard of, or a reading by, Simon Taylor before, but I'll be avoiding him for a few years. Maybe I just don't like his style and he's a perfectly fine reader, whatever it is, I had to let this book go.
He sounds almost amateurish in spots, and has a tendency to linger on a word as if for dramatic emphasis, but it seems unwarranted. He also has an unfortunate tendency to over pronounce the 'ng' on words like long, so it sounds like long-geh. Once you notice it, it becomes annoying.