Book Review: The Buried Life by Carrie Patel

The Buried Life by Carrie Patel

Book Source: Purchased

Genre: Gaslamp, Post-Apocalyptic

Series: Book 1 of the Recoletta Series

Publisher: Angry Robot (March 3, 2015)

Author Information: Website | Twitter

Tiara’s Rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Hundreds of years ago, something happened that changed the course of humanity. An event, the Cataclysm, that isn’t talked about has driven humanity underground. They’ve regressed to a more Victorian style setting where modern technology no longer exists. History prior to the event has either been destroyed or is closely guarded by one of its directorates. People have become intensely private and secretive about their affairs. This story takes place in one such city called Recoletta.

The Buried Life introduces us to Inspector Liesl Malone and Inspector Rafe Sundar. Malone is a wizened inspector who has spent many years working on the force, and Rafe is her wide-eyed new partner. Among the most secretive of inhabitants are the “whitenails,” Recoletta’s crème de la crème.  They are the aristocrats called white nails because they keep their nails clean and trimmed. However, when the murder of two whitenails fall on Malone and Sundar to investigate, they’re thrust in a guarded world where they’re regarded with suspicion and stonewalled. They’re given little recourse because the whitenails are held to a different standard than the ordinary citizens.

Admittedly, I went into this book expecting something a little dark. Instead, I was greeted with a fast-paced, light whodunit. I appreciated that the book didn’t spend much time with Malone giving Sundar all kinds of hell because he was a rookie. Sundar, a former actor turned inspector, brings a charm to Malone’s veteran investigation skills. He’s the sugar to her spice, and they work extremely well together, complementing each other’s weaknesses and strengths. Malone doesn’t spend half the book trying to discredit Sundar as many protagonists usually do with their rookie partners. Malone is about business, and she’s not going to quibble over something as working with a rookie as long as he keeps up. Also, I thought it was a piece of writing ingenuity that Sundar used to be an actor and Patel uses his background to help them along in their investigation.

Another major player is Jane Lin, a laundress for the rich, who finds herself a sort of witness for the second murder. She’s suddenly pushed into this world of opulence that is miles away from her own simple life. I never really reconciled with Jane in this book, even if the book did try to give Jane a role that was part of the bigger picture. I liked the character on her own merits and the freshness she brought to whitenails world, but her parts always felt so out of place to me. And she was a bit too doe-eyed for me sometimes in the context of the story and surroundings. I did feel she gelled better as the story went on, but I still have varied feelings about Jane’s role in this story, even though I did like the character.

The beginning of this book is a little slow, so if you’re one of those people who have a rule where you stop reading if things don’t get better by page 50, I do implore you to at least give it until about page 100 (maybe a little before) where things start to pick up significantly as threads begin to show themselves and you start seeing the characters in their elements more. After that, it becomes an incredibly fast read. The pages just seemed to fly by once I got out of that beginning. I wanted to know what happened. I had to know who did it and why they did it. Once Patel found her steam, her writing gripped me.

However, while Patel is a great writer, she spends almost no time using that skill on anything but the characters. I love characters, but part of what makes me love characters is their surroundings, the places they live, how they’ve been shaped by these things, how they interact with their world. There is almost no focus here on the setting or what happened to drive people to live underground. This was a world begging to be explored in prose.

While I don’t mind that the catastrophe isn’t defined and serves as a vague warning/fear in the back of the characters’ minds, I was a little disappointed that the setting wasn’t described a bit more. We have humans living underground, creating their atmosphere with gaslights. However, this place could look like Neverland for all we know with so little description of Recoletta. Couple that with the fact that people still go to the surface to do things like farm and sunlight is filtered into the city by skylights. There’s also some indication that some of their buildings may be, at least, partially on the surface. However, no one wants to live on the surface. At least, no one that lives underground. Yep, there are surface dwellers, though, who seem to live in hippie communes. It can leave a reader feeling a bit frustrated knowing these things and having no explanation for them.

While briefly glancing at some reviews to get a general feel of what people thought about the book, I encountered this question often: “How do you have a steampunk novel with little to no steampunk?” Simple, because it’s a gaslamp/gaslight novel, which can be housed with steampunk. However, it doesn’t usually include the bells and whistles that come with steampunk or go into the industrial science of the setting. There are some steampunk elements here, but mostly, it’s just gaslamp. If you’re looking to add more hardcore steampunk to your read list, this isn’t it, but if you don’t mind gaslamp with some steampunk elements, you may enjoy this book.

This was a mostly solid debut by Patel. It interested me enough that I want to read the next book, which I have right now to review. The ending definitely leaves the next book open for some terrific things to happen.