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A continuation of the story told in Song of the Slums, but with an adult focus. Verrol, now an adult and a successful musician, falls in with a young girl who is tied to his criminal past, and who exerts a dangerous fascination for him.
Notes
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Steampunk note: Featured in an anthology of steampunk romance fiction. Like the novel on which it draws (Song of the Slums), the story is set in an alternate nineteenth-century England. The events take place largely on a vehicle called the Skysplitter, which is driven by the recoil of cannons firing blanks: its inventor, an alternative version of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, calls it 'Humanity's First Step Beyond the Steam Age'. Reviewers occasionally describe it as 'gaslamp' fiction.
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Author's note:
It takes places after the events of Song of the Slums, when the Rowdies (Astor and Verrol's band) are an established success, and Astor and Verrol have settled down to live and love happily-ever-after … or have they? Verrol gets a huge shock when someone rises up out of his past, a woman who was just a young girl at the time of the terrible feud between the Starks and the Mauls. Reba Maul survived the general bloodbath, and she's been training to become the perfect killer ever since. She's deadly and beautiful and attracted to Verrol - but it's a strange and dangerously perverse attraction. Verrol can't help himself when the adrenalin gets into his veins, and his old past criminal self starts to take over again.' (Source: Author's website: http://www.richardharland.net/ [Sighted: 10/01/2017])
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
Song of the Slums
Crows Nest
:
Allen and Unwin
,
2013
Z1936763
2013
single work
novel
young adult
'What if they'd invented rock 'n roll way back in the 19th century? What if it could take over the world and change the course of history?
In the slums of Brummingham, the outcast gangs are making a new kind of music, with pounding rhythms and wild guitars. Astor Vance has been trained in refined classical music. But when her life plummets from riches to rags, the only way she can survive is to play the music the slum gangs want.
Charismatic Verrol, once her servant, is now her partner in crime...and he could be so much more if only he'd come clean about his mysterious past... ' (Publisher's blurb)
- 1800-1899
