CBR Bingo: Work (the main character’s motivation is primarily just wanting to do her job as an investigator).
I read P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins earlier this year and enjoyed it enough that I wanted to read some of his other works, so I recently picked up A Master of Djinn.
Set in an alternate-history (in the late 19th century, djinns were introduced into the world) Cairo in 1912, Agent Fatma works for a government agency that investigates supernatural occurrences. One evening, all the members of a secret society are murdered. They venerate the man responsible for the release of the djinn, and the murderer claims to be that man. Agent Fatma is the youngest female member of the ministry, and along with her new partner, is called upon to catch the killer.
The worldbuilding in this was really interesting – it felt like a fully formed setting, with a rich history (some of it real-life, and some pulled from myth). It gave me really similar vibes to Shannon Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy, so I’d recommend this book if you liked those. Along with the djinn there are also clockwork automatons, which gave the thing a sort of steampunky feel.
The plot does drag a little in the middle – there’s encounters between Fatma and her allies and the killer that get sort of repetitive (they fight, then someone runs away), but it does pick up again towards the end.
There’s a couple of novellas set in the same world that I’ll probably pick up at some point, and I would be interested in reading any future works too.