The Vitruvian Mask

By BJ Sikes

1881: The electric lights of Paris have been extinguished.
The Naturalist revolution is over. Adelaide was on the losing side. Once the Royal Scientist Doctor for the now-dead cyborg monarchs of France, she’s now a fugitive, hiding from the new king’s Police Sécrète.
Pregnant and alone, she seeks refuge in a Parisian hospital but things have changed there too. What was once a cathedral of Science is now a bastion of ignorance and superstition.
The battlefield veterans whose Augmented prosthetics she once created are shunned by the new regime and come to the hospital for her help. But her nemesis, the father of her child, has returned to France and threatens to reveal her illegal activities to the authorities.
Can Adelaide repair her Augmented patients without losing her freedom ... or her life?
The Vitruvian Mask continues the story of Adelaide Coumain, the Roboticist of Versailles, that began in The Archimedean Heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BJ Sikes
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780997437560

BJ Sikes

BJ Sikes is a 5'6" ape descendant who is inordinately fond of a good strong cup of tea, Doc Marten boots, and fancy dress. She lives with one large cat, two sweet teenagers, and one editor-author, plus an array of chickens.After writing a dissertation on avocado root rot, she was drawn back to her first love, fiction. Her debut novel, the Archimedean Heart, is the first book in the Roboticist of Versailles world, a French Belle Epoque that never was. A follow-up novella appears in the anthology The Clockwork Oracle. The Vitruvian Mask is the second full novel set in that world.She was the chief cat-wrangler/editor/contributor for three short story anthologies (Twelve Hours Later, Thirty Days Later, and Some Time Later). Her most recent short story was Riverhag, a solarpunk piece in the anthology Next Stop on the #13.Her next book, the Cultist's Wife, is the story of an Englishwoman who takes her family to 1908 Bahamas and almost loses herself and her children to a sinister cult.The new book will be available as soon as the story goblins allow.Come and see me at https://bjsikesblog.wordpress.com/

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