Three Princes

Wheeler’s debut novel does its alternate history setting a disservice with some ill-thought-out and poorly researched anomalies. Egypt has been a global superpower for thousands of years, yet many familiar cultural artifacts—absinthe, opera, Otto Von Bismarck—exist there just as they do in our world. This lazy worldbuilding undercuts a genuinely interesting big picture, in which the Egyptians and the rival Incans are the two world powers, competing for innovation and connecting with trade. The Bond-esque spy Scott Oken is a decent enough lead character, but a white male protagonist from Britain feels remarkably out of place in this story, and Wheeler never makes or takes an opportunity to use his minority status for social commentary. Readers willing to ignore the problems might enjoy the spycraft, the extrapolation of an Incan empire uninterrupted by genocide, and the banter between Oken and his partner in intrigue, Mikel Mabruke, formerly of the Pharaoh’s Special Investigators. But there’s little in the characters or story that hasn’t been done before, and the new setting simply emphasizes the old tropes. (Feb.)