From Publishers Weekly
The ninth Company novel (after 2007's The Sons of Heaven) introduces Edward Bell-Fairfax, a child of mysterious origins who gradually discovers that he's not quite like ordinary people. Born to an unmarried aristocratic mother, raised by distant foster parents, and spirited away to boarding school by the sinister Dr. Nennys, Bell-Fairfax serves an unhappy stint in the military and afterward is inducted into the Company of scientists and spies. Using messages from the future and Charles-Babbage-meets-Maxwell-Smart technologia, Bell-Fairfax travels Europe with his mentor, Ludbridge, attempting to swing the Crimean War in England's favor and learning in the process that achieving utopian goals requires a great deal of dirty work. Plenty of cloak-and-poison-dart action gets the reader through the exhausting Victorian nomenclature (the Aetheric Transmitter, the Ascending Chamber) and discourses on the evils of misused technology. (Mar.)
Copyright ΠΒ© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Returning to the worlds of the Company novels, Baker delves into the history of a young man whose name has come up before. Edward Bell-Fairfax is an idealist ideally suited to the life of intrigue and derring-do that RedkingΠ²Πβ’s Club provides. One Dr. Nennys grooms him, then delivers him to a residential place at RedkingΠ²Πβ’s. In a Europe layered with secret societies and intrigue, riddled with astonishingly advanced technology, where the great powers are trembling at the brink of war, Bell-Fairfax and three other young men are trained to work as a team of spies and assassins. Then they are sent on a grand tour across Europe, where they experience marvels, and Bell-Fairfax proves that he was born for the work. Baker builds a fantastic alternate Europe with a deft historical touch and spins an excellent spy story around it. Not Less Than Gods is a satisfying addition to the annals of the Company that is also an engaging stand-alone novel. --Regina Schroeder