The Legend of the Red Specter

Rookie reporter Joy Song Fan is at the end of her rope. Life isn't easy in the aftermath of the Great War of Nokomis, in which the upstart industrial nation of Kallistrate used its giant mechanical Steam Golems to vanquish the ancient dragon-riding empire of Albion. 

But Joy's life keeps going from bad to worse. Harassed out of her dream job by a predatory co-worker, blackballed by all the legitimate newspapers of Dodona, stuck working for a skeevy tabloid, she’s been given an ultimatum: find and interview the Red Specter.

Though the assignment seems impossible—the Red Specter is a ghost, an urban legend, a myth, a comic-book character—Joy is determined to do it anyway. It’s either that or starve. 

But Joy’s investigation through the seedy underbelly of the city of Dodona takes her into unforeseen dangers, as she stumbles upon a criminal conspiracy of fraudulent psychics, crooked cops, Triad gangsters, pirates, war criminals, human traffickers, and enraged cows.

And behind it all, Joy finds mounting evidence of a Red Specter who is far more real than she had ever imagined.