I picked this book up from IO9 at some point, and it’s been languishing on my Kindle forEVER, so I thought I’d finally give it a go. I was hoping, based on press, for sort of a speculative/alt history police procedural a la Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which I found utterly delightful.

Sadly, I was to be very disappointed. Empire State is Christopher‘s first novel, and it shows. It’s all over the place, with elements of noir, steampunk, alt history, mystery, superheroes, and more, and none of it ever quite gels into a coherent story.

I can’t say as I recommend this. Amazon’s reviews seem to bear this out, though that’s a notoriously fickle metric. The narrative just doesn’t hold up, and the characters are kind of flimsy and interchangeable (and not just in the way allowed for in the book’s universe). Christopher’s attempt at worldbuilding here is, well, a good attempt, but it doesn’t really work. The kitchen-sink approach to plotting — masked heroes! war! airships! robots! alternative universes! detectives! conspiracies! — rarely flies well, and this is no exception.