20 Hours to Charles Town: Madame Elvira's Magnificent Excursions

by Charlotte Henley Babb, C.K. Volnek

Synopsis

An airship madam risks her women's spy network for economic influence across continental North America despite rogue operatives, a shadow enemy and betrayal by the one closest to her. In an alternate history of North America, where the Revolt failed, and European superpowers have colonies in the mid-1800s, Elvira Starr and her life-partner, Erzulie Dahomey, run a mile-high brothel in an airship shaped like an elephant. Only the most wealthy and powerful can access her services, and she provides them information that they could not easily obtain elsewhere from well-trained spies as their escorts.After some 20 years of this business, Elvira learns of a new technology found in the new nation of Texas, recently seceded from Mexico. This technology would allow her airships access to California, so she is working to obtain agreements between British America, Florida, New France, the First Nations Confederacy, Liberia, and Mexico, to cooperate in trade rather than continuing to threaten war. However, the Mauverton Detective Agency has been working to infiltrate her network of businesses, apparently funded by some anonymous person or persons. She has an operative in their organization, but when another of their agents asks her for sanctuary, she sees an opportunity to debrief him. Now she just needs to get the strait-laced Texican to work with her despite his moral opposition to her work, and to make an alliance with the Pirate Queen of Liberia, a nation of former enslaved people, natives and pirates. But Elvira has personal issues that concern her partner, Zulie, and those have to be resolved to get the colonial ambassadors to Charles Towne for their official meeting about recognizing Texas. Can she root out the secrets held by her clients, manage a hoodoo, and deliver all the colonial ambassadors to Charles Town in time to prevent an international incident, or will she lose it all including the love of her life?

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Release date: May 10, 2019

Publisher: Independently published

Print pages: 325