Pelagia Harper, aka Valentine Lovelace, published her memoirs of her time in Draco, Texas and became an established writer—at least in her own mind. But when her father dies and her stepmother steals her royalties, she finds herself destitute. Also haunted. The ghost of her papa keeps popping up everywhere. When her father’s old flame, Sasha Devine, offers her a way out of her poverty, Pelagia jumps on it before she knows what’s involved. In 1897, the two ladies must travel North to the Klondike (the Wild West is a relative term as far as V. Lovelace is concerned) escorting the coffin of a man said to be Lost-Cause Lawson, a prospector.*It turns out the man beneath the coffin lid is not as dead as he was supposed to be and somehow, Pelagia ends up being accused of murdering a Mountie. Apparently the sensible solution to that is to fake her own suicide. The upshot is that when she finally does arrive in Dawson City with Sasha, she is obliged to take employment as a dance hall girl and a flamenco dancer (Corazon, the Belle of Barcelone). Her boss seems nice though. Very sociable, especially with all of his new female employees. It isn’t long before Pelagia learns that Vasily Vladovitch Bledinoff is giving the biting cold some competition. It isn’t until her friend Captain Lomax receives a new book from England, written by a fellow named Bram Stoker, that she begins to get a clue what exactly is going on with the mode for black velvet neck bands the girls are all sporting. Then there’s all of those really smart wolves, the threat of starvation and disease, and other strange and unusual wildlife.
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Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the author of more than 25 solo fantasy and science fiction novels, including the 1989 Nebula award winning Healer’s War, loosely based on her service as an Army Nurse in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. She has collaborated on 16 novels with Anne Mc Caffrey, six in the best selling Petaybee series and eight in the YA bestselling Acorna series, and most recently, the Tales of the Barque Cat series, Catalyst and Catacombs (from Del Rey). Recently she has converted all of her previously published solo novels to e Books with the assistance of Gypsy Shadow Publishing, under her own Fortune imprint. Spam Vs. the Vampire was her first exclusive novel for e Book and print on demand publication, followed by Father Christmas (a Spam the Cat Christmas novella) and The Tour Bus of Doom. Redundant Dragons is her newest exclusive novel in The Seashell Archives series and follows The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad.