Barbara’s rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
Series: Glass and Steel #4
Publication Date: 9/5/17
Period: Fantasy Victorian London
Number of Pages: 338

If you are reading the series in order, you know India, Matthew, and their friends finally found Chronos at the end of the last book. Will he and India be able to repair Matthew’s life-giving watch? Is Chronos India’s grandfather? If so, why did he disappear all of those years ago and allow his family to believe he was dead? We get answers to all of those and more in this fast-paced book.

Yes, their quest to repair Matthew’s watch continues because Chronos’s magic, even when combined with India’s is not enough. They learn they need to find a diary kept by a magical physician who has been deceased for almost 30 years and a living magical physician. The diary contains the original spell used in the creation of Matthew’s watch, and the magical physician must then speak the spell.

The hunt begins with trying to solve the 30-year-old murder of Dr. Millroy who kept a diary where he had written the spell – and by solving the murder, they would find the diary. The twists and turns of their hunt will keep you glued to your seat – and the revelations will knock your socks off. There is a particularly interesting twist toward the end where the murderer is revealed.

As seems to be standard in this series, we are left with a cliffhanger. Did Matthew find the location of the magical physician? We’ll just have to wait for the next book to find out who and where he is. I was happier with the plotlines of this book because Aunt Letitia and Willie have less on-page time. By this time, I was hoping for a resolution to the watch issue and the romance between India and Matthew, but we are still spinning our wheels on both. While the stories are interesting, the series isn’t exactly taking the path for which I was hoping. I hoped the romance and the watch would be resolved within the first three books and the remainder of the books in the series would be the two of them working together to solve mysteries. If some or all of that isn’t resolved within the next book or two, I will probably discontinue reading the series. Perhaps, for those next two books, Matthew could quit Purring and Growling as that is evidently what he does best – and the cousins and Matthew’s uncle can just crawl under a leaf somewhere. Oh! And Sheriff Payne needs to join the rest of Matthew’s family under that leaf. We’ll see.

At any rate, I think this was a good read with an exciting, fast-paced mystery – and I can recommend it as a good read.