Jacaranda: A Novella of the Clockwork Century

Something monstrous is lurking the halls of the Jacaranda Hotel. Guests check in but don’t check out, and whoever is committing these horrific murders is only growing more brazen. As a major hurricane approaches, a motley assortment of guests hunker down inside the Jacaranda, hoping to outlast both the storm and the murders. Can the curious team of a nun, a gun-toting priest, and a Texas Ranger save their fellow guests from threats both inside and out?

While other novels in Priest’s Clockwork Century series have dabbled in supernatural elements, Jacaranda is the first to go full bore and embrace the supernatural. It leaves behind much of the steampunk and pseudoscientific trappings that characterize the series, offering a cursed hotel and perils less tangible than sap-poisoned rotters and Civil War profiteers.

But a supernatural mystery doesn’t work unless we care about who might die, so Priest enlists Horatio Korman (from Dreadnought and Ganymede) and teams him with two engaging new protagonists who have been touched by the supernatural in the past, nun Eileen Callahan and former priest Juan Miguel Quintero Rios.

A welcome new wrinkle in an established series, Jacaranda shows there’s plenty of life left in the Clockwork Century universe.