An investigative journalist by trade, Miriam Beckstein is a resourceful gal. In fact, her many talents—from a passing proficiency with firearms to physical courage to a med-school education to a clever streak—seem wasted in her current position on the staff of a trade journal for the high-tech fields. So when Miriam and her research assistant, Paulette "Paulie" Milan, discover on the job that certain Boston bio-firms are laundering illegal drug money and then promptly get fired for their troubles (the trade journal's owner is in bed with the crooks), it seems like a good thing that Miriam is getting cut loose. Now she can rethink her life and accomplish more. But what that reorganization will involve is hardly imaginable at the start.

Visiting her adoptive mother to commiserate, Miriam is presented with some forgotten artifacts from her long-lost birth mother, including a mysterious locket with a mind-twisting mandala inside. Experimentation with the mandala reveals the locket to be a bridge between our world and a parallel Earth. This next-door universe is mired in the Dark Ages still, a place of wilderness and scattered primitive towns and proto-cities. The region congruent to our eastern United States is known as the Gruinmarkt. Ruled by an extensive royalty, the whole system is propped up by the worldwalkers and their powers and wealth, the Clan to which Miriam soon discovers she belongs by birth. Kidnapped by her long-separated relatives, she finds herself swiftly caught up in the machinations of the dimension-hoppers, who line their pockets by smuggling drugs between one world and the next.

Miriam meets her manipulative uncle, Angbard Lofstrom, and her handsome second cousin, Roland. She meets various women of the Clan—none of them in a liberated position, being seen merely as breeders of more worldwalkers—and the King at Neijwein, a palace that corresponds partially to the New York of our plane. Once the situation and her role are explained to her, Miriam finds her choices limited. She must either cast in her lot with the Clan or face death from any of several factions. A singleton worldwalker simply can't be allowed. Nonetheless, Miriam is resolved to upset the centuries-old applecart of the Clan.

Traveling back to our Earth and enlisting Paulette as her assistant (along with a medieval woman named Brill), Miriam is about to introduce some radical "business restructuring" to the Clan—if she can survive the various assassins on her tail—one of whom might be Roland, with whom she's fallen in love. This narrative, being only volume one in the series The Merchant Princes, ends on several cliffhangers.

In the tradition of Amber

The subgenre of SF that features protagonists from our world slipping off to a parallel dimension for adventures that often border on sword-and-sorcery is a noble and extensive one, and Charles Stross is plainly working here within that tradition—exhibiting, it might be added, an impressive display of mutability from his dominant ultra-cyberpunk style. His new book fits securely into the lineage of deCamp and Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter (1941); Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961); Robert Heinlein's Glory Road (1963); and Keith Laumer's The Time Bender (1966).

Most patently, however, as acknowledged on the dust jacket, Roger Zelazny's Amber mythos lends this volume its template of squabbling family members feuding across various strands of the multiverse.

Stross asserts his own stamp on this motif, however, by sharply limiting the aspects of his game, much in the manner that hard SF imposes real-world constraints on its subject matter. The powers that Miriam and her ilk possess only serve to bring one to exactly congruent spots from world to world. Thus, if you cross from Neijwein to New York, you have to take a train to Boston to cross back to Angbard's home, and so on. Trips are limited by the physical exhaustion they produce in the traveler. Worldwalkers can carry only about 100 pounds of extraneous matter with them, and so on. Unlike Zelazny, who revealed new aspects of his protagonists' powers at every plot turn, Stross weaves his plot complications out of the closely maintained constraints, making for a tale that's more realistic and convincing in a fashion—Mariam orients her travels with a GPS handheld unit, for instance—but less exotically glamorous.

With his parameters firmly in place, Stross does a fine job of building Miriam's character and managing her transition from simple reporter to someone who can be found stalking an assassin through a palace at night. She's hardly one of the stereotypical hard-nosed warrior women who inhabit space operas and Tolkienesque fantasies. Her doubts and mistakes exactly balance her self-assurance and ingenuity. The other characters—particularly Paulette and Brill—emerge as equally well rounded.

In the sections of the book devoted to court intrigues, one could swear that Stross was channelling one of the "mannerpunk" writers such as Caroline Stevermer. Sometimes the banter and politesse gets a bit much, and the fact that none of Miriam's putative enemies is as arrestingly developed as she is makes the contest rather one-sided. But still, her opponents—many of whom remain unrevealed to the reader by the end of the book—serve their purpose well enough.

Finally, a large part of the fun of this book derives from what John Clute refers to as "wainscot" fantasy: the notion of a secret society operating within the general culture. The way the worldwalkers manage their system of "doppelganger" houses and their shipments of goods between worlds provides an intellectual kick fully equal to the various hunter-prey scenes.