A Darker Shade of Magic

This is a much better cover than the Kindle image,
although there's something disingenuous about
adding 'a novel' to your cover these days.

There are four Londons. Red London lies at the heart of a world filled with magic and wonder. White London is the centre of a starving world, where power-hungry sorcerers wrestle the vestiges of magic wherever they may be found. Grey London has no magic, just a mad king named George and an empire of iron and steam. And Black London went rotten with wild magic and had to be locked away for all time. Only a few people possess the power to move between the worlds. Kell is one, a servant of the Red Throne; Holland, servant of the White is another. As far as they know, they are the last. Delilah Bard is just a thief in Grey London, but when Kell is tricked into throwing the balance of the worlds out of equilibrium, she may have a key role to play in setting things right.

A Darker Shade of Magic is a crossworlds fantasy about magic, deception and crossdressing wannabe pirates. It has a neat bit of worldbuilding and some interesting ideas, but ultimately feels like an incomplete part of a larger whole (as perhaps indeed it is*,) and seems to fail to break out of some of its more conventional moulds.

Red London is depicted as the prime world, the best of Londons. It is hinted that there are flaws in its apparent perfection, that not all are happy in this seeming-Utopia, but the unmitigated vileness of the Dane twins, gleefully sadistic rulers of White London and its empire of bones, serves to mask the flaws. Likewise, when Holland is controlled by a bolt of magic through his soul, it papers over the fact that Kell appears to have been taken from his family as a child and 'claimed' by the royal family of Red London, an issue that is raised, but never resolved. The threat of rogue magic rears up in various places, but particularly in Grey London never really materialises into anything but a red herring.

Delilah Bard skirts a number of very irritating tropes without ever falling into them, but her story feels unfinished. It is strongly hinted that she is a third Traveler (which would place one as native to each of the realms, and suggest that maybe there is one in Black London as well,) her identity concealed by the fortuitous loss of her distinctive black eye, but that too is never resolved. It would in part explain her wanderlust, and the innate sense of responsibility that she appears to share with Kell (and to an extent, Holland.)

It's not a perfect book, but is a good start to a series, and I would certainly be interested in future installments.

* Edited for new information, although the book makes no such indication, the slightly arch 'a novel' on the cover actually suggesting away from a series.