Play the part people expect, and they’ll believe it every time. Not all illusions require magic.

This is a story about biases clouding perception and how people are not always what they seem. A mystery that was Sherlock Holmes in premise, but Scooby Doo in execution, with an even less climactic “unmasking” than in a typical episode.

The world-building here is gorgeous. Steampunk Cairo of the 1910s where Egypt has resisted colonialism and become a world superpower is truly something to behold, and the descriptions are so vivid that you feel like you’re actually walking through the streets, watching the boilerplate eunuchs serve coffee. From the ministry building to underground nightclubs to Fatma’s apartment, every part of the world feels fleshed out and delightfully novel. It’s a world where magical djinn and clockwork angels intermingle with humans, but the fantasy elements are still fairly light, with the world explicitly stated to be very newly adjusting to the existence of magic. The world-building is genuinely so fun that it carries a lot of the book, and is the main thing I would recommend reading it for.

Unfortunately, everything else fell completely flat to me.

I found the main story utterly boring. Mystery is not really my genre, but I assumed that being a page-turner is part of its appeal. There was never a time when I wanted to turn to the next page to learn what happens next. Every time we left behind the colorful descriptions of Cairo as a city and returned to the main story, my eyes started to glaze over. I found the plot lukewarm, the mystery predictable, and the plot twists not very clever. Everything was very obviously telegraphed, so there was very little element of surprise, and the ending was relatively anticlimactic considering how long the build-up was. The pacing is very odd, meandering painfully slowly for 85% of the book, pivoting to breakneck speed for the finale, only to drag slowly again immediately afterward. Even after the final anime battle ends, you’re still left with over 50 pages of chatter that really dulls any excitement from the conclusion of the story.

Additionally, the writing overly relied on visual interest to a level that didn’t work for me in text format. This was written more like a Marvel screenplay with tons of proposed visual set pieces and bland, quippy “wow, that looks like it hurts” humor rather than a novel with compelling characterization and narrative structure. The constant emphasis on describing every granular detail of the setting, the magical creatures, and the characters’ wardrobe (literally, we got a long-winded paragraph every single time anyone changed outfits) feels like a bit of a crutch and gives me the sense that the author had more of an aesthetic vision for this book than a narrative one. I would’ve probably enjoyed this vibes-based approach more in a visual medium like film or an animated series, so that I could still appreciate the visual feast of the unique setting and the choreographed action scenes even if the story itself is your stock mystery novel fare.

Now, onto our main character, Agent Fatma el-Sha'arawi. On paper, what’s not to like? She’s a queer, Egyptian, steampunk Sherlock Holmes with a cane and a snappy suit. I was primed to like her based on that premise alone. However, Fatma turned out to be a complete dud of a character to me, which is a shame. We are told (not shown) over and over that she is this badass genius detective/agent, top-of-her-class turned top-of-her-field, famous for working alone and solving every case she’s assigned, but she spends a huge portion of this book taking her sweet time arriving at relatively mundane conclusions and taking no initiative in solving this case. She spends essentially zero time collecting evidence or looking for clues and seems remarkably unobservant even for a regular person, nevermind a renowned agent for The Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities. She bumbles into situations with remarkable naivety and lack of preparation, getting by with pure luck and plot armor. Hadia (her fresh-faced new partner) and Siti (her paramour) have to hard carry her through this entire case with their connections, street contacts, and combat skills. Maybe if we spent more time seeing Fatma actually doing detective work instead of her romantic pursuits or choosing which suit to wear (I swear to god I can’t read another paragraph about one of her suits), I’d have believed more in her apparent fame and talent.

There’s also the other issue of Fatma’s blatant biases that cloud her judgment and bleed into professional shortcomings. Her internalized misogyny and other forms of ignorance skew how she perceives people, both personally and professionally, and have serious consequences for this case. Now, I am completely aware that this is thematically important to the work, which argues that colonialism and internalized misogyny twist your perception of the world and make it easy for nefarious actors who know how to play the part expected of them to exploit your preconceived notions. I get that. The message here is not exactly subtle, and I understand what the author is getting at, especially after the on-the-nose illusions are explained. BUT, I feel like you can EITHER write a thematic work about the importance of not letting implicit biases materially compromise your judgement, OR write a story about an ace detective with a stellar reputation of razor-sharp instincts solving cases, but not both. It just doesn’t reconcile that a detective of this caliber would be so blinded by unfounded misconceptions and still be considered the ministry’s most competent agent. I spent a large portion of the book baffled at how ineffective Fatma was at her job, which was extremely distracting. Even the final resolution turned out not to have needed her involvement at all, leaving me wondering why she was here in the first place.

I maintain that Hadia, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new recruit, would’ve been a natural narrator for this kind of story, as she comes to Cairo with a clean slate and is just learning to solve cases with Fatma as a partner and mentor. It would’ve made more sense for Hadia to be the one to learn the lesson about people being more than what they seem, which should’ve been a lesson that Fatma has learned many times over by now. Being in Hadia’s head also would’ve let me enjoy Fatma more as an eccentric character in smaller doses, like in the short stories that precede this novel, which I did enjoy a lot more. There is a reason the Sherlock Holmes stories are narrated by Watson and not Holmes himself, after all.

Overall, the inventive world-building does manage to mostly make up for a rather lackluster… everything else. I think I would recommend the short stories set in the same world (ex. Dead Djinn in Cairo) over this book, as they give a taste of the unique setting without getting bogged down in this particular story for over 400 pages.