Did Not Finish - The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

I got this book as part of Sarah's Round Robin which had stopped for a while but it's got going again now. While it didn't look like my kind of thing, I thought I'd give it a go. It is intriguing, but the story wasn't moving fast enough for me and at a hundred pages in I gave up. I feel like I gave it enough of a go!

The story is set in the late 1800s and it's sort of steampunk in origin, which would appeal to a lot of readers. Thaniel works as a telegraphist at the Home Office and one day someone breaks into his bedsit and leaves a watch on his pillow. He can't work it, or open it up, but then one day there's a bomb threat from Clan Na Gael (an Irish independence party) and the watch ends up saving Thaniel from getting killed. He then discovers the watchmaker and sets out to meet him. Meanwhile, a young woman called Grace is a student in Oxford and she has a watch too, although at the time I gave up nothing had happened to her with hers. We also saw flashbacks of the watchmaker, Keita Mori, and his life in Japan.

I liked the writing in this and thought it was quite poetic and lovely in places, but like I say the story just didn't move fast enough for me. I hate not finishing books but now I'll pass this on to the next person in line!