The Anubis Gates

This is an exciting and intricate tale involving time travel, magic, and body-swapping. Although the hero and a few other characters are 20th-century Americans, it's mostly set in London, England, of the 17th and 19th centuries, with excursions to Egypt and (briefly) Greece.

I found the story fluent and entertaining. Its magical aspects are well enough presented; its non-magical aspects strike me as having a slight touch of fantasy about them. However, it could be argued that a world in which magic works might differ subtly from ours in other ways.

One aspect of it I found unconvincing was the idea of a girl-dressed-as-boy living for months in the early 19th century with a gang of all-male beggars and outlaws, some of them highly dangerous, without being found out by anyone. It's not only implausible that she succeeded; it's implausible that she'd voluntarily put herself into that situation. Couldn't she find any lower-risk way to pursue her quest for revenge?

I generally prefer sf to fantasy, and this is clearly fantasy, but it's a relatively restrained kind of fantasy, using magic only occasionally and for fairly limited purposes.

It's a pity that there are few likeable characters in it. I suppose Jacky is the best of them; the hero Brendan is inoffensive but only mildly likeable.

I'm reviewing the book after reading it once. I may have more to add after I get around to rereading it.

Really more like 2.5 stars.

This book had a lot of interesting ideas, such as magic undergoing some sort of reversal around the birth of Christ, but most of the interesting ideas either weren't explored enough in favor of the swashbuckling adventures of the time-traveling protagonist, who I never really took a shining to.
Brendan Doyle always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow survive by the skin of his teeth. He's not really that likeable, has some tragic backstory about his wife that is set up to be super-traumatic but barely plays into his character, and becomes annoyingly fatalistic in the second half of the book. I think it says something that I often found myself rooting for the antagonists, who always (from their perspective) got the short end of the stick from this annoyingly persistent and should-be-harmless protagonist, and most of whom have the sympathetic goal of rewriting history so that Egypt maintains its independence from British rule.

Reading the other reviews, apparently this is often described as a steampunk book, but it is really not in the slightest, so if that's what you're in it for, look elsewhere. All in all, it was a decently interesting book that kept me reading more from a passing “let's see what happens” as opposed to an attachment to any particular character or plot-thread.