The Hangman’s Revolution by Eoin Colfer (review)

At the conclusion of this series’ first entry, aspiring FBI agent Chevie Savano was headed back from Victorian London, where high value witnesses were stashed via wormhole, to her own contemporary milieu. The time-travel trip doesn’t go as planned, though, and this second installment has Chevie landing in an alternate modern time, in which evil Colonel Box now controls a reconfigured Britain—sterile, homogeneous, and at war with France. Worse still, Chevie is a cadet in Box’s army, but strange inner voices (memories, actually) impel her to defy authority. Meanwhile, back in 1899 London, her ex-partner Riley is having his own issues with gang kingpin Otto Malarkey, who insists that Riley is his minion and owes a share of his theatre’s profits. With a flick of the authorial wrist, Colfer reassembles many of the star performers from his last outing and tasks them with fiddling with history to preempt Box’s revolution and save the world as we know (or will know, or could know if the correct alternate events ensue) it. Again, Chevie and Riley are the durable adhesive that holds the plot line together, and their unromantic friendship is a joy to encounter. It’s the loony supporting cast that provides character and color, though, with Malarkey at his grandest, Box at his most deranged, and several newcomers (especially Malarkey’s Irish butler, Figarty) who will be worth tracking in coming adventures. Terry Pratchett fans will be a natural crossover audience for this developing series, and they will appreciate how Colfer tidily tucks some serious consideration of historical myth-making and of religious zealotry as a political force into his comedy-laced mayhem. Two down, and hopefully several more to go.