The slums just so happen to be experiencing a revenant plague, which incubates in the blood of bite victims for a week before making the symptoms known.

Artificial Zombie: The Chapman & Villiers automata are powered by the stolen brains of murder victims from the slums of London.

Alternate History: Steam powered carriages and clockwork robots? Welcome to Victorian London!.

Two of the three are killed gruesomely, and a third barely escapes with his life.

Action Prologue: The prologue takes place in India, where a patrol of British soldiers are attacked by a revenant.

The only all-mechanical automaton Newbury and Hobbes see in a brief demonstration never malfunctions. Is a Crapshoot: Discussed but ultimately Averted - the automatons were technically cyborgs, making use of cheaply obtained human brains as a biological shortcut for the automatons' intelligence rather than having to reproduce the mechanical brains Villiers created.

AB Negative: The Fixer's butler is mentioned to be a universal donor:.

Travelers risk getting lost if they go walking without a lantern and a curb or a fence to follow, and there's always the risk of revenants lurking in the mists.

A Foggy Day in London Town: Exaggerated - the London fog is thick and nigh omnipresent, from early morning and through much of the day.

Some trope names below can spoil the book's plot twists. Danger awaits Newbury & Hobbes at every turn, and duplicitous figures are working to ensure that some mysterious remain unsolved. Meanwhile Scotland Yard deals with a spate of grisly murders and a terrifying plague that's ravaging the slums of the city. When a dirigible crashes under mysterious circumstances, Sir Maurice and his recently appointed assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are called in to investigate. This is a London where ghostly policemen haunt the fog-shrouded alleyways of Whitechapel, where cadavers can rise from the dead and where Sir Maurice Newbury, Gentleman Investigator for the Crown, works tirelessly to protect the Empire from her foes. But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side.

The story is set in the strange and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city filled to the brim with the greatest technical marvels the Empire can muster: airships, ground trains, horseless carriages, and clockwork automatons.

The Affinity Bridge is a 2008 novel, the first full-length entry in author George Mann's 'Newbury & Hobbes' series, combining a Sherlock Holmes mystery bent with Steampunk and zombies.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann