Lady Diana Furnaval’s husband, William, is the last in the line of gatekeepers. It turns out the family estate has a gate into another realm on it, and William’s family has kept the worst of what can come from the gate from effecting other people. There are of course other gates, and when William is asked to help with one in Romania, both he and Diana sense a trap, but he goes anyway. And Diana finds herself a widow.
At that point, Diana makes it her mission to close every gate in the world, and we get to go along on a journey to India, China, and America. It’s pretty fast paced from here, and the story actually wraps up pretty well at the end of this book, but this is Book 1 in a series, so I think it’s got the potential to be a good set up to some interesting stand alone adventures.
I think the thing I liked best about this book is that though it’s pretty much a steampunk book (it’s a Victorian setting – maybe not true steampunk because the technology isn’t tending in that direction, but the attitudes are), it’s not completely over the top anachronistic – I can see Lady Diana Furnaval actually living in Victorian times. Sure, she’d be considered eccentric, but I can see her there, something I don’t often get from a lot of other books of this type.