Halo Round the Moon

This is story number 3 in the series about Maliha Anderson. She lives and solves crime in the alternate steampunk past British empire in India and Celyon.

Maliha is like a female Sherlock Holmes and the police and the government depend upon her skills. The ebook is about 136 pages and can be read in one day.

Fiction stories are art, so our enjoyment of them is more dependent on how they make us feel, than whether we agree with every concept in them. This story, like all art, does not depend on my liking every element in the story. Instead, the story works because it engages a reader like myself and moves my emotion. This story did those things for me.

Maliha is a complex character with deep character flaws. Her amazing ability to solve crimes is matched with her inability to live comfortably with her fellow humans. She is much more at ease with the lower caste members of society, than she is with her social equals. Many aspects of Maliha' past are revealed slowly in the stories, so we have some understanding of why her character flaws exist.

Most readers will probably enjoy this story more after exposure to one or both of the previous stories. As I mentioned, there are slow reveals of her past, so I came to this story with more of a background feel for the characters. A few of the other characters have been carried over from previous books also. The plot is not a continuation from previous books, so someone could probably get away with reading this one, if they have no access to the previous ones. I am looking forward to the next story in the series.