A Sound like Distant Thunder: A Steampunk Raj Novel

A new century has brought a new competitor to the Great Game of Empires: the Germans, in alliance with the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire, hope to gain control over the oil fields of the Middle East. And while treachery and deceit have always been part of the espionage trade, teenagers Elizabeth Bankroft and Michael O'Connell, alumni of the intelligence school known as the Viceroy’s College, must also use their mystic arts training to help their military masters. It’s a game of move and counter-move between the Russians, the British, the Germans and the Turks, but that’s the easy challenge. Elizabeth and Michael and their families of spies must also survive a world going to war. Author JR Seeger brings ‘Steampunk in the Raj’ to life as two young spies, Elizabeth Bankroft and Michael O'Connell, match wits, wizardry, and courage with murderers, mystics, colonialists - and each other - in pre-World War One India and the Ottoman Empire.

It’s a thrilling and dangerous mix of Rudyard Kipling, H.G Wells, and T.E. Lawrence that awaits the reader as the two secret agents and their teams search for secrets and try to derail their enemy’s plans. It’s a magical ride, not to be missed.
-JAMES STEJSKAL, author of The Snake Eater Chronicles

* *. *. *.

J.R. Seeger transports the reader into the era of the Raj with a rollicking tale that reeks of authenticity, drawn from a fizzing imagination that springs from both scholarship and real-world experience. No stranger to the modern-day battlefields of Afghanistan that remain unchanged in many respects from days of yore, he conjures up the sounds and smells of the Near East as he expertly crafts a plot that twists through the shadow and shade cast by the British Crown.
-TOBY HARNDEN, war correspondent and author of Dead Men Risen