Is Our Writers Learning? Cold Copper by Devon Monk (#SFWApro)

(Don’t have cover art credits, but all rights reside with current holder).
And here we are with December’s book, the third in Monk’s Age of Steam series. It’s well done, which makes me regretful it didn’t really grab me.
The premise: It’s the Old West with magic, evil spirits (the Strange) and steampunk tech along the frontier.
The Story. Cedar Hunt is a bounty hunter cursed by the Pawnee with lycanthropy, in which form he lives only to hunt and kill the Strange. His friend Rose is an engineer traveling with a roguish airship captain. The immortal Madder brothers have recruited Hunt to help them find the pieces of the Holder, a rather blandly named super-weapon capable of Very Bad Things. Unfortunately, the quest takes them to Des Moines, which is under the control of a scheming villain using the Strange as a power source for his steamtech. Rose and her captain meanwhile are drawn into the same adventure …
What I Learned:
Steampunk may be the new normal. I know it’s the third in the series, but it still leaped out at me that Monk makes no effort to explain why the West is this wild. If it’s reached the point where steampunk settings can be taken as a given (the same way I accept the Hyborian Age or Barsoom, say), that saves a lot of exposition when writing them.
Exposition Isn’t Essential. Again, probably because it’s the third book we get very little background on Holder and Rose. But that works fine. We know what they’re doing in the present, that seems to be enough. We get little details about their background here and there, but Monk does a good job
Tension Matters. I know, hardly an original thought, but the early chapters show why it’s so important by not having any. Rose doesn’t seem to have any goals, she spends her first few chapters fuming over a misunderstanding with the captain. Maybe I’d have felt more urgency to her heartbreak if I’d read the first couple of volumes and knew her better, but as is, it was stock enough rom-com stuff that I couldn’t get interested (a shame, as Rose is a fun character, reminiscent of Firefly‘s Kaylee).
Hunt has a goal, finding the Holder, but it’s not a very exciting one. Monk tells us repeatedly that the Holder is potentially the most devastating weapon in existence, but we don’t see much sign of it here, which makes it hard to get excited about the search.
Things improve as we go along and the Des Moines mayor begins throwing obstacles in their path. One thing I do like is that while the book’s plot throws all kinds of obstacles in Hunt’s way (missing children, crooked mayor, evil magic) it still stands on its own as a separate plot, rather than focusing purely on getting the McGuffin.
Overall, very instructive.