The Empress of the Clouds by Desiree Ultican

In March 1896, Evaline “Evvy”Amstel has been left with a tremendous debt―before he was murdered, her husband had promised to build and deliver a revolutionary airship, The Empress of the Clouds, to Erasmus Marchand, a Southern millionaire who resents the fact that the Yankees won the Civil War. Now that Amstel is dead, no one in Joplin, Missouri, a mining boomtown, knows where the aircraft is. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin also has a stake in finding it. He’s accused Evvy’s husband of stealing the original designs and is determined to recover the Empress for Germany. Evvy takes over her husband’s failing airship company and it thrives. But Marchand is fanatical in his quest to find the Empress―to arm it with a weapon of mass destruction and instigate anarchy. It’s up to Evvy and local deputy Sean McTavish to find the airship first, because the future of the United States is in peril.

Category: Science Fiction – Steampunk