• The Songs from the Seashell Archives continue in a new book of the Brown witches and Rowan royals in the age of steam and dragon!

 

Steampunk in the Frozen North:

 

THE DRAGON, THE WITCH, AND THE RAILROAD:

Popular Magical Realm Kickstarted by Fans into Steampunk Era

 

While still an office nurse in Fairbanks, AK, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough sold her first book, SONG OF SORCERY, which was published by Bantam Books in 1971.  In the years that followed, Bantam published three other novels in the Songs from the Seashell Archives series. Fans have been asking ever since for another book about the fantasy world of Argonia and its dragons, witches, minstrels, and royalty.

 

In Dec. 2013, a successful Kickstarter campaign enabled Scarborough to write a new book in the series, a steampunk-ish (roughly equivalent to Victorian times in this world) update on the medieval-ish original books. THE DRAGON, THE WITCH, AND THE RAILROAD is set in an Argonia where a great war has changed the landscape, now spanned by a railroad. Magic is unfashionable, and the once wild and fearsome dragons, voluntary allies of the Argonians, have been virtually enslaved to provide firepower for the burgeoning industrial revolution.

 

In the midst of all of the economic and political jockeying for money and position, Verity Brown, a girl whose curse is a compulsion to tell the truth, is orphaned when her father is killed in a balloon disaster. She searches for her father's murderer while at the same time trying to aid and protect an innocent dragon wrangler and his dragon, who saved her own life. In pursuit of truth and justice, she becomes a sacrifice to a wild foreign dragon with an unusual agenda.

 

She's aided by Ephemera, her archivist great-aunt who is losing her memory, a cross-dressing pirate, a were-fox attorney and a mysterious time-traveling Gypsy woman.

Released in digital format at most online venues in March of 2015, THE DRAGON, THE WITCH, AND THE RAILROAD will be available as a print on demand in April, 2015.

 

"I love the way she talks to dragons," writes Kerry Greenwood, author of the Miss Fisher mysteries now popular as a PBS TV series.

 

"An absolutely charming addition to the Seashell Archives," writes popular author C.E. Murphy.