The Spark and the Cogs
When the fever claims clockmaker Bramwell Cogsworth, he leaves his daughter Mira more than grief and a cluttered workshop, he leaves her a brass hand of his own final design, fitted with sprocket and spring, and an unfinished masterwork locked in his workbench drawer. Within days, Solicitor Halloran arrives bearing papers that will see Mira's inheritance sold to pay phantom debts, while Aldric Vane, the city's most ruthless industrialist, circles her doorstep with offers she cannot accept and threats she cannot refuse. Mira has only her father's loyal automaton Brass, the sharp-tongued orphan Pip, the reclusive herbalist Hesper Greenleaf, and the eccentric scholar Maester Vellum to stand beside her. With the wardens of the law, Sheriff Holt among them, slow to act and Old Merriweather's warnings ringing in her ears, Mira must decode her father's last journal, finish the invention he died to protect, and uncover what truly lies beneath the skin of her own clockwork fingers. The clockwork scribe Aelian Quill claims the journal is pure myth, Widow Hawthorne guards secrets of her own, and the clock is already ticking. Each turn of Mira's wrench brings her closer to a conspiracy that could crown a clockwork tyrant, or bury her in the same grave as her father.