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Alice Payne Arrives (Alice Payne, volume 1)
By Kate Heartfield
31 Dec, 2019
Miscellaneous Reviews
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2018’s Alice Payne Arrives is the first installment in Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne series.
Alice father Colonel Payne served for England in the American Revolutionary War; he returned home changed for the worse. Life at home is increasingly difficult for Alice. She could escape by marriage, if some well-heeled man were to overlook her mixed race heritage (which is not all that likely). But a staid, conventional, boring marriage has no appeal to Alice. She prefers to make a living as a dashing highwayman known as the Holy Ghost. She has a minion, an automaton named Laverna. (So, steampunk.)
Alice’s scheme to rob the odious Lord Ludderworth goes awry when Ludderworth, almost all of his servants, and his carriage vanish after the robbery. Highway robbery is common enough that it doesn’t draw a lot of attention, but a vanished aristocrat draws far more intense scrutiny. Alice may be hunted down and hanged.
That’s bad enough, but, as Alice will discover, time travel makes everything worse.