While I read the 'Aztec Eagle' books because Catherine Wells is an Arizona author, I enjoyed them a great deal and I wasn't going to say no when her publisher, Jumpmaster Press, offered to send over three of their earlier titles, by other hands, that have apparently done well for them. This is the first of them and it's a gimme for me to tackle because it's clearly steampunk, with goggles in use in the opening regparticularly well. This is the first in a series that has reached at least five books thus far.

The worst thing about this one is that it's clearly just a beginning and there's much more to come that doesn't show up in these pages. We can guess at some of it and we might even be right, but I believe Ligon was relatively content at this point to introduce us to the world that he planned for his backdrop and then focus in on a few principal characters and locations. There is some action to keep our blood pumping and some intrigue too, but there's not much to speak of on a grand scale yet. That's what the sequels are for and it wouldn't shock me if he'd already written a few of them by the time this introductory volume was published so readers didn't have to wait long.

Jason is eleven-years-old and the son of a nobleman, Lord Falconbone. He's four years junior to his sister Leah and there are other family members about, not least Uncle Leo, but Lady Falconbone died when the king's fleet bombed their former home of Airendale Castle and prompted them to flee. I'm sure there's all sorts of sociopolitical reasoning behind this fracture at the highest levels of the land but we only get hints at that here. There seems to have been a lot of misjudging going on, on a lot of sides. Again, I'm sure we'll get much more of that later as the series expands.

When he escaped the king's attack, Lord Falconbone took what was left of his family and followers from their privileged life of safety and they now reside in a floating mountain obscured by clouds that was formerly occupied by pirates, namely their age old enemies, the Cardinals. In fact, when the remote province they live in was created by an earlier king, it was so that an ancestor of Lord Falconbones could rid it of the pirates to free up the mountains for the king's men to mine coal. Is the current rift merely due to the suggestion that the coal has finally run out? It seems like there must be more to it than that.

Now the Falconbones have become the pirates, in a sense; though they don't indulge in raping or pillaging this time out and probably not next. It's likely that they're pirates only in the sense that they're illegal now, having upset the ruler of the land, and so are forced to get by in whatever way they can. While we don't have a lot of background yet, it certainly seems that the Falconbones are the good guys and therefore the bad guys would appear to whoever doesn't ally with them. Is this that straightforward? I don't know yet. Book two ought to answer that question.

I'm guessing that the bright brass creation in the cover art isn't representative of any airships in this book but it may well do, given how much effort Ligon clearly put into their design. Certainly, a Hummingbird has wings that flap so it's not one of those, and isn't 'The King's Regret' of the title either, as that runs three-hundred feet in length with a hundred-foot gondola. Crucially, this ship is fifty-years-old now and the tech behind airship design has moved on considerably, rendering it practically obsolete. It's a Class 7 Mod 2 and the latest and greatest are the immense Class 12s.

The primary characters are Jason and Leah and his friend Suzanne McPhaen, who obviously likes him a lot, and seem likely to play an increasingly large part in their evolving story, so this is YA. We're given adults to pay attention to as well, though Lord Falconbone is gone for much of this book, on a dangerous mission to seek an alliance with the Cardinals. Mostly it's Uncle Leo, who's obvious at base as its chief mechanic, and Julian L'Aeden, who isn't obvious at all. In fact, nobody even knows he's there until he helps out at a key moment, showing Jason and Suzanne the location of a critical leak that raises the strong likelihood of a saboteur being at work.

You won't be shocked to discover that circumstances change, evolve and deteriorate and, at one pivotal point in time, it falls to an unlikely band of characters to take 'The King's Regret' out for a crucial mission for which it arguably isn't suited. No, this isn't designed to be the most surprising steampunk action adventure novel out there. In fact, the change in the grand series arc from the first page to the last amounts to pretty much zero, but what it does, it does well. Ligon builds his characters with careful detail and he does the same with his machinery and the one location that we've encountered thus far, which is an absolute gem. I want to explore the place!

Jason has all the potential to be an excellent lead, especially as he's only eleven-years-old and so has plenty of growth to come. There's nothing better than adversity to shape a man. That said, it holds true for a woman and Leah has plenty of potential too. Lord Falconbone is only a figurehead at this point, though I'm sure we'll spend more time with him in future books. Uncle Leo is tailored to be a supporting character that everyone adores and Julian L'Aeden is a very capable wildcard. I have no idea what his story arc will be, now that he's made his presence known, but his future is as wide open as Ligon wants it to be. Never mind that, in a neat homage, "I be too advanced in years for this nonsense"!

So the worst thing about this book is that it's just a beginning, arguably even just a long prologue, but the rest of it does exactly what it needs to do and that bodes well for what's to come. Looking at the synopses on the Jumpmaster Press website, 'The Golden Feather' looks like it deepens the fantasy aspects by trawling in Jason's dreams and 'The Falcon' escalates considerably. Given what possibilities exist on this backdrop, I wonder how many books Ligon is looking at. This series could run for a long time indeed. ~~ Hal C F Astell