Full of magic, mystery, and romance, an enchanting steampunk fantasy debut in the bestselling vein of Trudi Canavan and Gail Carriger.
Orphaned as a child, Octavia Leander was doomed to grow up on the streets until Miss Percival saved her and taught her to become a medician. Gifted with incredible powers, the young healer is about to embark on her first mission, visiting suffering cities in the far reaches of the war-scarred realm. But the airship on which she is traveling is plagued by a series of strange and disturbing occurrences, including murder, and Octavia herself is threatened.
Suddenly, she is caught up in a flurry of intrigue: the dashingly attractive steward may be one of the infamous Clockwork Daggers—the Queen’s spies and assassins—and her cabin-mate harbors disturbing secrets. But the danger is only beginning, for Octavia discovers that the deadly conspiracy aboard the airship may reach the crown itself.
Nebula Award–nominated author Beth Cato hails from Hanford, California, but currently writes and bakes cookies in a lair west of Phoenix, Arizona. She’s the author of the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth trilogy, plus scores of other short stories and poems across a multitude of publications. She shares her household with a hockey-loving husband, a numbers-obsessed son, and three feline overlords.
Beth Cato is the author of The Clockwork Dagger and its sequel, The Clockwork Crown, newly released from Harper Voyager. Recently, she sat down with us at Phoenix Comic-Con to talk about creating colorful worlds, always playing the healer, and how she became the High Priestess of Churromancy.
Not all steampunk books are alternate histories. Some are fantasy worlds tinged with Victoriana or magic (or both). Sometimes the period signifiers stretch out of the Victorian era: back to the Regency, ahead to the first World War. Sometimes it’s not an industrial revolution, but a far future analog with brass worlds and spaceships clanking […]
We decided to do something a bit different this month—instead of just one Mind Meld at the end of the month, we’re doing four, covering four times as many of our favorite scary reads. We’ve asked our bookish friends near and far about their current favorite horror favorites, and are breaking them out by the […]
There is no feeling quite like reading a Beth Cato story, and it’s time more people experienced the sensation. The ones found in Red Dust and Dancing Horses would be a great place to start; they are intense, heartfelt epics in miniature, often focusing on the relationships and people at the heart of broader, more overtly […]
In Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Kate Wilhelm wrote, “Great fiction reveals that there is no such thing as a common, everyday uninteresting person. They are all interesting if you learn enough about them to discover who lives behind the facade.” So we asked members of the […]
