Holloway - A Study in Darkness: Book Two in The Baskerville Affair

This book has just about everything: magic, machines, mystery, mayhem, and all the danger one expects when peoples loves and fears collide. I cant wait to return to the world of Evelina Cooper!

Kevin Hearne

As Sherlock Holmess niece, investigating murder while navigating the complicated shoals of Societyand romancein an alternate Victorian England, Evelina Cooper is a charming addition to the canon.

Jacqueline Carey

Holloway takes us for quite a ride, as her plot snakes through an alternate Victorian England full of intrigue, romance, murder, and tiny sandwiches. Full of both thrills and frills.

Nicole Peeler, author of the Jane True series

A Study in Silks is a charming, adventurous ride with a heroine who is both clever and talented. The brushes with the Sherlock Holmes mythos only add to the fun of this tale, and readers are bound to fall in love with Evelina and the London she inhabits.

Pip Ballantine

In A Study in Silks, Emma Jane Holloway has created a wonderful reimagining of the Sherlock Holmes mythos set in a late-Victorian Britain ruled by nefarious industrial titans called steam barons. Holloways clever writing, attention to detail, and sublime characters forge a fascinating world that combines brass-plated steampunk technology with magic. By turns a coming-of-age story, a gas-lamp thriller, and a whimsical magical fantasy, A Study in Silks is the premiere novel of an author to watch.

Susan Griffith

Holloway stuffs her adventure with an abundance of characters and ideas and fills her heroine with talents and graces, all within a fun, brisk narrative.

Publishers Weekly

A Study in Darkness is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

Copyright 2013 by Naomi Lester
Excerpt from A Study in Ashes by Emma Jane Holloway copyright 2013 by Naomi Lester

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

D EL R EY and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book A Study in Ashes by Emma Jane Holloway. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

ISBN 978-0-345-53719-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-54566-4

www.delreybooks.com

Del Rey mass market edition: November 2013

Cover design: David G. Stevenson
Cover illustration: Gene Mollica

v3.1

August 1, 1888
OVER LONDON

5:30 a.m. Wednesday

WHAT IF THE SKIES NEVER CLEARED AND HIS QUARRY slipped past, swathed in cloud like a bride beneath her veil?

Or what if the enemy burst forth like a vengeful ghost, spewing a fiery retribution of lead and flame? Indeed, an airship with that much cargo would have guns aplenty on board.

There were a thousand what-ifs the captain of the Red Jack could not avoid, but that was the price Nick paid for this new life on the knife-edge of risk. But as an orphan abandoned to the circusperhaps a Gypsy by his dark features, or perhaps something even less welcome in the worldhis existence had been one gamble after another. Plundering a ship twice the size of his own craft was just one more.

Nick had called his magic earlier and raised a vision of where his quarrythe Leaping Hindwould pass, but something had gone amiss. By now the Hind should have sailed into view, engines groaning beneath the weight of all that wealth. She would be coming in off the coast, flying low and with holds crammed with clockwork, gears, and costly parts from the German statesa queens ransom in shining brass.

Nick shut his eyes and listened, giving up on sight. The engines of his ship were silent as it drifted with the wind. The creak of rigging was a comforting chorus, as if the Red Jack muttered to itself as it waited. Condensation dripped from the lines. He could hear the footsteps of his men moving around the shipDigby at the helm, Beadle giving orders to the bosun and the boy, Striker cursing at some piece of equipment. Through the fresh, clear air, Nick caught the scent of gunpowder and grease.

Athena, Nick muttered under his breath. Do you sense anything?

There are birds, the air deva replied from her place of honor at the prow. Devas did not have a voice exactly, or language, though that was how Nick perceived it. The ash rooks.

Anything else? The rooks were always near, looking for something dead to eat. They were as much pirates as the men.

Captain Niccolo is impatient, Athena chided. For shame. A successful thief bides his time.

The elemental spirittrapped in a half-melted metal cubeseemed female, although she possessed no physical form of her own. Before the cube had been stripped of all its golden decorations, it had been known to scholars as Athenas Casketan ancient Greek navigation device. Nick had started calling the deva Athena, and the name had stuck. She was the soul of the airship, its intelligence and vital force, and she made the Red Jack unique. No other ship, much less pirate ship, had a deva on its crew, and only Nick could speak to her.

Not that those conversations always went smoothly.

Im not impatient, he growled. Im concerned.

You are impatient. Your thoughts buffet me like a gale. There is no need.

I have buyers waiting for what the Hind carries.

All that metal men prize so highly. Dull stuff. But then she was a creature of air.

Metal makes machines. Machines make power.

And that powerheat, light, pumps to drive clean water into streets and villageswas a necessity of life. The steam barons ran the utility companies as well as the railways, dockyards, and most factories that produced weapons or mechanical parts. They were even branching into the defense industry and the telegraph. And where the barons took an interest, competition was quite literally crushed. No company dared to challenge their monopoly.

To make matters worse, conspicuous consumption of heat and light had become a hallmark of status among the gentry, and that drove up prices and left the poor to shiver in the dark. All this guaranteed an underground market for parts to build unauthorized machinesgenerators, windmills, batteries charged by wind, and whatever equipment a man needed for his trade. And thats where the pirates sailed in and made their fortunes.

And what did Nick plan to do with all the profit? He wasnt sure anymore. Every man had his dream, but hed had to let his go. Or rather, his had walked away with a toss of her long, dark curls. Perhaps he was saving up to buy forgetfulness, for surely there must be a sorcerer who could carve Evelina Cooper out of his heart.

He felt a twinge of exasperation from the deva, equivalent to a human woman rolling her eyes. You must heed your birds, Niccolo. They have found the ship you seek.

Nick opened his eyes, looking out at the wet expanse that wrapped the