The Brass Cylinder of Saint-George
A Novel of the Paris Pneumatic Wars

About this book:

Beneath the gaslit grandeur of 1889 Paris, a city runs on compressed air. Millions of messages, meals, and state secrets hurtle through iron arteries at two hundred miles an hour—until the system begins to hemorrhage. When a mysterious brass cylinder traps itself in the Grand Central Vault, threatening to collapse three miles of tunnels and bury the boulevards in boiling steam, the Compagnie du Tube Parisien turns to the one man they discarded: Jean-Luc Vane, a disgraced courier who knows the network's every rusted bypass and illegal junction.

Armed with a pressurized harness, a ticking arrest warrant, and a Director who would rather see him hanged than paid, Vane must ride a suicidal back-feed through the catacombs, the sub-Seine conduit, and the shifting quarries of Montmartre. Saboteurs are reversing valves from the inside. The pressure is rising toward rupture. And the cylinder vibrating in his pack carries a secret that could topple the Republic—or ignite the first war fought not with guns, but with the very air beneath the streets.

*The Brass Cylinder of Saint-George* is a high-velocity steampunk thriller where the machine is the monster, the map is a lie, and the only way out is straight through the dark. For readers who love the industrial grit of *The Difference Engine*, the clockwork tension of *Leviathan*, and a hero who measures his life in atmospheres.