Born in Wisconsin and raised in Illinois, Patrick Canning now calls California home where he lives with his dog Hank. Canning has written several books, a collection of short stories called Five Fantastic and a novel named Cryptofauna. Canning’s latest offering is novel The Colonel and the Bee.
The Colonel and The Bee is about an explorer and an acrobat who travel the globe on a huge hot air balloon. On their spectacular journey, the duo search for a treasured artifact and a deadly treasure hunter who also desires it.
Canning sums up The Colonel and The Bee with the following:
“Beatrix, a spirited but abused acrobat in a traveling circus, seeks more than her prison-like employment offers. More than anything, she wants to know her place in the world of the halcyon 19th century, a time when the last dark corners of the map were being sketched out and travel still possessed a kind of magic.
One night in Switzerland, the mysterious Colonel James Bacchus attends Beatrix’s show. This larger-than-life English gentleman, reputed to have a voracious appetite for female conquests, is most notable for traveling the world in a four-story hot air balloon called The Ox.
Beatrix flees that night to join the Colonel, and the two of them make a narrow escape—Beatrix from her abusive ringleader, the Colonel from a freshly-made cuckold. Beatrix, feeling the Colonel may have the answers to her problems, pledges to help him catch the criminal he seeks in exchange for passage on his magnificent balloon.
The criminal seeks a precious figurine, The Blue Star Sphinx, but he’s not alone. The Sphinx’s immense value has also drawn the attention of the world’s most deadly treasure hunters. A murder in Antwerp begins a path of mystery that leads all the way to the most isolated island on Earth.”
Here is more information about The Colonel and the Bee:
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