Bøger af Eleanor Jane Prophet

CIRQUE DU FLAIRE Pietro Augustus Flaire's Dazzling Spectacle of Delectation! Stimulation! and Stupefaction!Amidst the Clouds andAmong the Firmament!When she is accosted in the street by the bedazzled and flamboyant Eitenne Allard, a funambulist for the Cirque du Flaire, who claims his employer, Pietro Augustus Flaire, has bewitched his twin sister, Elodie, and has concocted a most nefarious scheme involving the apparent disappearance of a favoured spectator, Astrid Darby and her clever young wards, Xander Knightly and Juliana Coffin, are drawn into a surreal and shocking mystery upon the famous flying carnival. Amongst cavorting clowns, frolicking funambulists, exotic beasts, a gruesome freak show and a mysterious snake charmer with an uncanny instrument, Astrid, her wards and Agent Asher Key of the Ministry of Defence attempt to thwart the charismatic Flaire's dastardly plot. They are soon to discover, however, that their considerable skills are little match for the ringmaster's adroit and deadly tricks.

In the years after the American Civil War, the West is wild, and the East is run by the robber barons battling each other for power and money. The range is untamed and blood-soaked, and the cities are dazzling tributes to culture and questionable scientific development. Outlaws roam free on the frontiers, and crooked lawmen and Pinkertons compete with lawless bounty hunters for the prices on their heads. Tess Mercury and her posse are the best damn bounty hunters in the West. When Tess and her posse, trick shooter "Bonny" Quimby Burton, mad scientist "Lightning" Hazel Harley and Vaughn, a former slave, are run out of town after brawling with some card players who don't take kindly to being swindled by Quimby, Tess decides a life of leisure just doesn't suit them. They go in search of a new bounty to hunt and discover the case of Zeke "Angel" Cooper, a Pinkerton wanted for murder in Boston. The hunt for Angel leads them through the untamed frontier where Indians lie in wait, young men fighting for honor are shot dead in the streets, Che Chucho and his posse of peculiar bounty hunters are hunting them, and savvy, sophisticated Madam Esther Star courts the big bugs from D.C. at her famous brothel, the Governor's Mansion. When Tess and her posse finally run into Angel, they're tangled up in an even greater mystery involving faulty death rays, crooked lawmen, missing secretaries, murdered government agents, bribery, corrupt Congressman, clockwork horses, Tess' long lost husband, and Sterling Rush, the technology robber baron who might just be a more dangerous enemy than any of them have ever encountered.

Now rogue from the Ministry of Defence for his outrageous accusations against the renowned and well-connected Professor Julius Coffin, Agent Asher Key engages Astrid to help confirm that the professor is indeed responsible for the disappearance and suspected murder of no less than ten people. Despite her scepticism, Astrid concedes to facilitate his investigation, and they join the professor's annual retreat to his private island, the Isle of Jules, an island rumoured to be home to mysterious and sinister forces. Amidst jealousy over Asher's attention to their fellow reveller, the lovely Chanha Behari, Astrid's own distraction by Chanha's handsome brother, Imaron, and her young cousin Xander's particular attachment to the professor's frail and bafflingly ill daughter, Juliana, Astrid and Asher attempt to unravel the dark secrets of the island. The sudden disappearance of their man, Reinhart, persuades Astrid that something treacherous and terrible is truly afoot on the island. If they cannot discover whether their deadly foe be head hunters, exotic beasts, ghosts, vampires or their odd, secretive host, their island holiday could become something far more perilous, indeed. What they reveal about the island and its master, however, is far, far worse than their wildest suspicions could possibly conceive.

It is a time of steam technology, scientific innovation and quietly simmering political tension. Having lost her husband to the dangerous life of an adventurer and the hazards of hot air balloon travel and murderous mercenaries, Astrid Darby has found herself alone in the world, aside from her motley assortment of eccentric associates, mad scientists, cheeky Ministry of Defence agents, and her keen, clever young cousin, Alexander Knightly. Now an esteemed and erudite adventurer herself, Astrid is, once again, embroiled in a grand conspiracy, the scale and nature of which she has only begun to imagine. When Dr Sebastian Cross, one of England's most acclaimed physicists and inventors, is discovered missing along with the Eye of Ra, the doctor's revolutionary new directed energy weapon, the executives of Rake & Gage, premier defence contractors, enlist Astrid to locate the doctor and recover his apparatus. Despite Messrs Cole's and Thorne's certainty that the doctor and his assistant, Dr Joseph Ramsey, have absconded with the weapon and defected to a rival contractor, Astrid suspects something far more sinister is afoot. Her search for the Eye leads her into a world fraught with colourful characters, improbable death rays, flying airships, awkward wagon rides, uncouth wranglers, murderous mercenaries, perilous train trips, underground tunnels, ludicrous disguises, condescending Ministry of Defence agents, treacherous executives, malicious terrorists, and the destruction of a beloved national landmark.