Emily Edwards has a simple life as the town witch of Lost Pine, doing what she can to bring in a living by doing her small magics and helping out the townsfolk. An arrogant Warlock named Dreadnaught Stanton from New York city has the nerve to be studying her and Pap's form of folk magic, all the while lecturing her on something she has been doing for years, and quite well, too.

That quiet life gets complicated fast when, through a concatenation of events, Emily ends up with a magic-sucking sacred stone embedded in her hand and accompanying Mr. Stanton to San Francisco to consult with the closest center for the Mirabilis Institute, his Alma Mater of sorts. As harrowing as the journey is, with encounters ranging from fighting off magically-mutated forest creatures and a night pent with Indians, it is only the beginning of the adventure as it becomes clear the stone is of interest to many, and most of them won't care for the inconvenience of Emily's attachment to it.

Having honed her craft via her short stories, Hobson has produced a polished, rich first novel. THE HIDDEN STAR is rife with derring-do, melding Steampunk bones with the flesh of magic, based in a bedrock-logical alternate reality. Touches like a great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and imaginatively complex examples of 19th century mechanicals married to the use of various forms of magically generated power add to the fun, while the suspense and action mounts leading to a grandly satisfactory conclusion. Book 2 in the series, The Hidden Goddess, is due out in April of this year, and I can't wait to read it.