Ganymede is the third novel in Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century sequence, set in a steampunk 19th-century North America where the Civil War is still being fought after more than two decades and various locales are infested with the living dead. Though there is some overlap with the preceding novels, Boneshaker and Dreadnought, the story is sufficiently self-contained that it can be read alone.
The story begins at the New Orleans boarding house owned by Josephine Early, a freewoman of color who's undertaking a secret mission for the Union. Several years earlier, an experimental Confederate submarine (the Ganymede) sank at the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, and it's been covertly recovered by a band of guerrillas led by Josephine's brother. None of them can quite get the hang of its controls, though, so Josephine reaches out to her ex-boyfriend, an airship pilot named Andan Cly, a former pirate looking to go legit. He has no love for the Confederacy, so he and his crew agree to take the sub down the Mississippi to a U.S. naval vessel waiting in the Gulf of Mexico.
This is a rollicking adventure, but Priest also takes the time to give all her major characters, and many of her minor ones, depth and personality. Priest also makes sure readers are comfortably situated within her new version of American history, where Texas is again an independent republic and Louisiana's bayous are the home of a pirate utopia. The anachronistic technologies are sometimes surprising, but they readily fit within her world. Even after three novels, there are still plenty of unexplored corners in the Clockwork world, and you'll probably finish Ganymede eager to see where Priest is headed next. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com