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HE INHERITED A WATCHMAKER'S STORE - AND A WHOLE HEAP OF TROUBLE. But idle sometime-musician George has little talent for clockwork. And when a shadowy figure tries to steal an old device from the premises, George finds himself embroiled in a mystery of time travel, music and sexual intrigue. A genuine lost classic, a steampunk original whose time has come.

In 1986 K. W. Jeter coined the term "steampunk," applying it to his first Victorian-era science fiction alternate-history adventure. At last he has returned, with a tale of George Dower, son of the inventor of Infernal Devices, who has been in new self-imposed exile... accumulating debts.

The world Dower left when he went into hiding was significantly simpler than the new, steam-powered Victorian London, a mad whirl of civilization filled with gadgets and gears in the least expected places. After accepting congratulations for his late father's grandest invention-a walking, steam-powered lighthouse-Dower is enticed by the prospect of financial gain into a web of intrigue with ominously mysterious players who have nefarious plans of which he can only guess.

If he can locate and make his father's Vox Universalis work as it was intended, his future, he is promised, is assured. But his efforts are confounded by the strange Vicar Stonebrake, who promises him aid, but is more interested in converting sentient whales to Christianity-and making money-than in helping George. Drugged, arrested, and interrogated by men, women, and the steam-powered Prime Minister, Dower is trapped in a maelstrom of secrets, corruption, and schemes that threaten to drown him in the chaos of this mad new world.

Some time after the events of Fiendish Schemes, George Dower finds himself a widower, of sorts. On her deathbed, Miss McThane entrusts Dower with a small, ticking clockwork box. The box is mysteriously linked to her.

When she breathes her last, the box stops ticking and Dower is able to open it, to find hundreds of letters -- written in an unknown hand, signed only with the initial S. They're not love letters, but refer instead to the letter-writer's ongoing search for some other person. The last is a simple note, reading "Found him"...