The year is 1859. US Army agent Sam Clemens rides west in his amphibious steam-truck, the Jim Smiley. His mission is to get the unruly Kingdom of Deseret, with its air-ships and its rumored phlogiston guns, into the looming conflict on the side of the north and union.

His opposite number is Edgar Allan Poe. Believed dead for a decade, Poe works deep undercover for the nascent confederate conspiracy, traveling in disguise as an exhibitor of Egyptian antiquities that conceal weapons and other gadgets: a hypnotic hypocephalus, a canister of flesh-eating brass scarab beetles, and the mysterious Seth Beast.

Poe is dying of consumption. Worse than the possibility of death by disease or defeat at the hands of that ingenue Clemens, though, is the risk of being defeated by his arch-nemesis and former lover, the chief counterintelligence agent of the Kingdom, the counterfeiter, poisoner, and seductress, Eliza R. Snow.

I wrote City of the Saints with the distinct fear that it might never, ever find an audience, and I wrote it as an act of sheer love. Now, not only is the book in print with a mid-sized and rapidly growing publisher, it’s currently (and for the next 13 days) in the famous Humble Bundle, along with Frank Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, Jody Lynn Nye, Neo Edmund, and a power-punching host of other top-notch authors.

So if you’re an ebook reader, go take a look at the Humble Bundle. There’s an astonishing array of stuff available at the price you set, including unpublished classics from past grand master, reissues of out-of-print works, series headers by young writers, and even outsider art. Like mine.

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