Lost Things

The Order of the Air, Book 1

By: Melissa Scott, Jo Graham

Narrated by: Joshua Saxon

In 1929, archeologists began draining Lake Nemi in search of the mysterious ships that have been glimpsed beneath its waters since the reign of Claudius. What they awakened had been drowned for 2,000 years. For a very good reason.

Veteran aviator Lewis Segura has been drifting since the Great War ended, fetched up at last at the small company run by fellow veterans and pilots Alma Gilchrist and Mitchell Sorley, assisted by their old friend Dr. Jerry Ballard, an archeologist who lost his career when he lost part of his leg. It’s a living, and if it’s not quite what any of them had dreamed of, it’s better than much that they’ve already survived. But Lewis has always dreamed true, and what he sees in his dreams will take them on a dangerous chase from Hollywood to New York to an airship over the Atlantic, and finally to the groves of Diana herself….

The world is full of lost treasures. Some of them are better off not found.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than 20 science fiction and fantasy novels, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She can be found on LiveJournal at mescott.livejournal.com.

Jo Graham worked in politics for 15 years before leaving to write full time. She is the author of the Locus Award-nominated Black Ships and the Spectrum Award-nominated Stealing Fire, as well as several other novels, including the Stargate Atlantis Legacy series. Her next book, The General's Mistress, is highly anticipated from Gallery Books. She lives in North Carolina with her partner and their daughter. She can be found online at jo_graham.livejournal.com.

The Order of the Air is an original series, created by Melissa Scott and Jo Graham, loosely tied in to the past of the O.C.L.T. series books. Watch for the next volume in the series, Steel Blues, sometime in early 2013. Find many more sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery, and other genre titles from Crossroad Press—featuring best-selling authors like John Farris, John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Neal Barrett Jr., Steven Savile, David Niall Wilson, and many others. If you enjoyed Lost Things, you might like our other original series, O.C.L.T., set in modern times. Simply search Crossroad Press to locate our more than 500 available titles.

©2012 Joanne Elizabeth Wyrick and Melissa Scott (P)2022 David N. Wilson

Critic reviews

Scott and Graham avoid the pitfalls of conventional occult adventure thanks to their clean, well-crafted prose and their embrace of unconventional characters in unorthodox relationships. What could have been a mundane collect-the-plot-tokens supernatural thriller becomes a pleasantly intriguing story in their talented hands. -- Publishers Weekly

The story is equally spent between action and quiet character moments, introducing us to these people and this world while simultaneously moving the story forward. The end result is a vibrant and utterly believable world peopled by characters you can’t wait to see in action again. -- Geek Speak Magazine

Interesting “urban fantasy” set between WWI and WWII

I got the impression the authors had a lot of fun writing it and the historical world building was excellent. Interesting characters and relationships between them.