My Arizona novel for August is a treat of a book. Then again the presentation rather sets it up to have to be that strong, which, needless to say, is absolutely no guarantee that it will be. It's a lush volume, only available in a well-bound hardcover edition with the title embossed on the slipcover. It's printed on high quality paper, so it feels notably heavy. And it's laid out well too, not perfectly because its use of smart apostrophes is horribly wrong, but with elegant typefaces, good margins and a slight space between paragraphs that leaps out to my proofreader brain but probably looks elegant again to most readers. It even has good cover art, making it feel like a treasure.

And all that serves as a heck of a pitch, but the story has to live up to that or it's going to seem all the more horribly wrong in comparison. I've been there before. The good news is that it is indeed that good. I devoured it in a single day, albeit with a number of naps and a few other breaks, but I didn't want to put it down. Its biggest problem is that it's the first volume in the 'Rellion's Rogue' series and naturally I want to dive straight into the second. Which isn't out yet. And, given that it took eight years, according to the acknowledgements, to get this one done, I'm not going to count any chickens that I'll see the follow-up any time soon.

We meet Rellion quickly but he isn't the only lead. Initially, the focus is on Kristane, a young lady who works as part of his pickpocket gang, who are collectively the Rogue of the series title. As the story moves forward, it's told from both their perspectives, as well as her brother Xander's and a number of others we won't meet for a while. We're in the city of Kairos where their headquarters is a characterful attic space above a monastery. All the locations here are characterful and there are quite a lot of them on offer. The only one we don't really get our teeth into is the Bizzarre, an underground safe space similar to the Continental in the 'John Wick' movies, run by a rogue called Rotten Luck Remy.

The worldbuilding is rich and rewarding. It isn't just the design of these locations, it's that they're all busy and colourful, with an admirable focus on smells especially in city scenes early on. There's history to a lot of them. Sometimes that's chronicled, the Drunken Chymist having been run by the Pope family for fifteen generations until its current landlady, Kate. Sometimes it's so old that it's become lost to legend, like Lt. Riley Blackmore, the current Master of the Manor Hall prison, not having a clue who the prisoner in the stateroom is or why he's there. He's seemingly been there as long as it's been a prison and the only detail passed down is Ix, so that's what she calls him.

Now, it all starts during the annual festival of Hallow's End in Kairos, so it was always going to be busy and colourful, the Rogue keen to pick pockets during performances such as Doc Fatterpacker and Peg-Leg Noodle's Travelling Medicine Show. However, it ends traumatically, a rare celestial event triggering the return of the Forgotten Ones, wild steampunk wraiths whose return heralds events long prophesied but largely fallen into myth. A grand political and religious chess game is in play and few know who's playing, let alone who the pieces are. Rellion quickly becomes the most obvious as a man of serious power, but he's an enigma, so we don't know if he's a player or merely a powerful piece.

And so we go. The biggest problem the book has is that a crucial revelation two hundred and fifty pages in was completely obvious in the opening chapters. The authors—Rose Pliseis is a Rose and a Pliseis working together—set up a great deal of mystery as they begin and so we ask a heck of a lot of questions. Who are the Forgotten Ones? Who is Rellion? Is he a magician? What's so bitingly important about the necklace that Kristane wears? And why does he call her Princess? Clearly, the latter two questions are particularly important and there really aren't a lot of ways to answer the second of them. Merely asking the question gives us the answer.

The various parties we care about follow their own paths but they're inevitably brought together at points and just as inevitably broken up by circumstances. They find their various ways to wildly imaginative locations and gradually reveal more of what the big picture is all about, beyond just a princess and a necklace. As all that happens, we learn what a varied set of influences fed into this novel. Clearly, it's epic fantasy, though the majority of the characters are human. Clearly, it's also steampunk, with all sorts of glorious mechanical creations. However there's a lot more here.

For instance, Rellion, who's clearly one of the key players given that the series is named for him, is initially Fagin but soon Gandalf. And, for all that he seems to be regarded as a high priest, he has the swagger of a legendary righter of wrongs, maybe a little Aragorn but far more Zorro or Percy Blakeney. This is a swashbuckler long before we meet Pollyanna, the Dame of the 'Lady's Grace', a larger-than-life redheaded pirate. And he's Indiana Jones at points too, because there's a vibrant sense of adventure throughout this epic fantasy.

'The Lord of the Rings' is always going to get brought up, not just because of how akin to Gandalf Rellion often becomes, but because Pipkin is quite obviously a Gollum-esque character, a frazzled feral young boy who changes mood on the turn of a dime. However, he seems to be a good guy and he's also a Fool with a capital F, so he's a lot of fun to be around. There's also a fundamental quest and legends with bite and fabled inns and an immense dragon and swords with names and, quite frankly, this tries for pretty much everything and nails most of it.

Yes, this book, should it take off the way it deserves to and find its way into society's collective pop culture consciousness, would check off a whole slew of boxes for my trivia quizzes. I have one about drinks (Kate serves a mean Fat Cherry Popped Fizz for the kids), one on prisons (the Manor Hall), a look at fictional books ('The Tale of Two Brothers' is especially important here, though maybe we'd be advised to pass on the children's colouring book about the Clan of Dead Fairies. Well, unless we happen to be dwarves.) There's even an automaton band at the Drunken Chymist by the wonderful name of Count Bobo Mahoney and the Steam Powered Swing.

In fact, there's so much here that it wouldn't be too hard to put lists together of our favourite this and that. Favourite characters? I haven't even mentioned the villain, High Priest Cristobal Zekel, a religious despot in the Cardinal Richelieu vein, just as calculating but a little madder. Or a big old mechanical war horse of the kings, Aldebarron. Favourite locations? Along with the many that I've already mentioned, there are tunnels crisscrossing an abandoned mine; there's the Ward, with its martial arts training ground populated by "self-articulated manikins"; and there's the Moonlight Chapel, where the Wee Folk congregate. This is a richly enough imagined world to conjure up a lot of favourite lists.

The downsides are almost non-existent. Proofreader nerds like me will find the odd mistake here and there, not just those frustrating smart quote failures. There's so much set up that not all of it gets wrapped up in book one, which is arguably fine. I almost went back to re-read to figure out if Dr. Steven Radley's watch, that was a gift from his ballsy grandmother, ever found a purpose. It's surely too prominent at a couple of points for it to not be more than it seems. And, as I suggested, one of the key revelations is utterly unsurprising. Fortunately, it's far from the only one.

So I should thank Hayley Rose and Russell Plieseis for handing me a copy of this gem for review as I wandered this year through whatever Author's Alley is called nowadays at Phoenix Fan Fusion. I'd planned to wait for the paperback edition, which would presumably be rather lighter, but I'm not going to complain at having a signed copy of this hardback on my shelves. Thanks, folks, and, yes, I think you should get a table at Wild Wild West Steampunk Convention next year if there are some available. You should be on panels too. ~~ Hal C F Astell