This had so many good elements to it that could have made a kick-ass book, but instead just fell limp and flat. Dark academia with anatomists and chemists developing secret magical uses of phlogisten and aether and sigils? Yes please! 18th century Glasgow vs. Edinburgh medical professors fighting Scottish enlightenment battles? Yes please! Secret societies engaging in hidden power plays of town vs. gown to determine who runs the universities? Private assassins who are risen from the dead in arcane rituals? Hidden libraries with magical portals? Yes yes yes please!

And yet none of it actually came together in any kind of meaningful plot. William Cullen and Joseph Black spend most of their time playing musical chairs between positions at Glasgow and Edinburgh. The secret societies and various aristocratic patrons engage in murderous battles to support Cullen and/or Black for one positoin or another, except when they go away for ten years for reasons that are never entirely clear. Really, a lot of the power structures and motivations that drive all of the plot of this book are murky. What do the dark chymists actually want besides power that makes them so anti-Cullen? How do the institutional politics of university governance, split apparently between town councils, aristocratic meddlers, funding bodies, and--I guess--secret evil dark societies---how does that all actually work? Department meetings and wars of public opinion would be a lot more interesting if I actually understood the stakes and mechanisms of decision making. It was a weird combination of too much telling and also not enough telling. I spent a lot of time being told about people's various alliances, but I still wanted more exposition. What were the stakes behind the rivalries? Some of the ultimate stakes are so secret that nobody can actually be basing their alliances on them, and others are so entirely secondary to the main power struggles (like, road repairs, or the logistics of translation in smallpox inoculation projects) that it's baffling that they can be behind the deadly power struggles at the universities. I saw a lot of ticking, but none of the mechanism behind it, and so the experience of reading the book was about as interesting as watching the second hand on a clock go around in circles.

I think the problem here is that all the people are real: William Cullen was a real dude; Joseph Black is so real that there's a campus building named after him at the University of Glasgow. So the seemingly aimless switchy swapping between Glasgow and Edinburgh and the weird 10-year delays between plot points are presumably constrained by actual historical records. I imagine the Cumbernauld Road repairs and Highland smallpox inoculation projects were likewise based on real history. But the result is that the pacing was lumpy and the plot dragged and clumped. Oh, and the attempt to include women in the very dude-heavy plot was so miserably contentless that I would prefer they'd been left out entirely. It felt almost insulting to have token female characters with pointless appendix plots assigned o them thrown in my face, as if that would be enough to mitigate the fact that this is a book entirely about men doing men things.

So: great conceit; lousy execution.