The year is 1877. Automatons and steam-powered dirigible gunships have transformed the nation in the aftermath of the Civil War. Everything on the other side of the Mississippi has been claimed for Russia. Lincoln is still president, having never been assassinated, but the former secretary of war Edwin Stanton is now the head of the Department of Public Safety, ruling with an iron fist as head of the country's military. Liam McCool is a bad man, one of the best Irish cracksmen there is when it comes to robbery, cracking safes, and other sundry actives—until he was caught red-handed by Stanton. Those in the South who don't fit into Stanton's plans for the Reconstruction, and Stanton realizes Liam McCool is more useful doing his dirty work than sitting in a jail cell. But when his sweetheart, Maggie, turns up murdered, Liam McCool realizes he'll do anything, even if it means getting way over his head with bloodthirsty Russians, to solve the crime. The King of the Cracksmen is...

A quick-witted Irish safecracker juggles alchemy and automatons in the action-packed follow-up to the nineteenth-century United States steampunk adventure, King of the Cracksmen.Liam McCool, the premier safecracker in 1877 New York, isn't the type to hang around fairy circles on the Celtic day of the dead. But an invitation from his Gram leaves the “King of the Cracksmen" possessed by the spirit of Finn McCool, the great hunter-warrior of ancient Ireland and a mighty magical force.Just in time, too. Edwin Stanton, once Lincoln's Secretary of War but now a self-proclaimed dictator, has restored slavery in the United States, and conscripted every able-bodied white male to fight in the war he's waging against Little Russia, made up of all the continental North America west of the Mississippi, sold to Russia by Andrew Jackson fifty years earlier.Stanton needs Little Russia's calorium, a mineral used to power America's airships, factories, and humanoid...