I hear good things about these Burton & Swinburne adventure novels by Mark Hodder.

The series opened with The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Sept. 2010) and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man (March 2011). Come on, you have to love them just for the titles. Book #3, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon, arrived in January, 2012, and #4, The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi, in July of last year. In regards to that last book, Steampunk godfather KW Jeter noted, “Mark Hodder vaults to the front of the new steampunk writer’s pack.” Time for me to jump on board now, I think.

SPRING HEELED JACK IS JUMPING BACK!

It’s 9 p.m. on February 15, 1860, and Charles Babbage, the British Empire’s most brilliant scientist, performs an experiment. Within moments, blood red snow falls from the sky and Spring Heeled Jack pops out of thin air in London’s Leicester Square. Though utterly disoriented and apparently insane, the strange creature is intent on one thing: hunting Sir Richard Francis Burton!

Spring Heeled Jack isn’t alone in his mental confusion. Burton can hardly function; he’s experiencing one hallucination after another-visions of parallel realities and future history. Someone, or something, is trying to tell him about… what?

When the revelation comes, it sends Burton and his companions on an expedition even the great explorer could never have imagined-a voyage through time itself into a twisted future where steam technology has made a resurgence and a despotic intelligence rules over the British Empire!

The Return of the Discontinued Man will be published on July 8, 2014 by Pyr Books. It is 339 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition.