Archibald Vex has just proved that an hour does not need sixty minutes. Unfortunately, the city agrees.

When his experimental chronometric resonator turns a perfectly respectable hour into fifty-one functional minutes, every Bureau-certified clock in Cogwright begins behaving accordingly. Trains depart before they arrive. Workers are fined for lateness they never committed. Official records start rewriting themselves.

Inspector Eleanor Grimshaw is sent to contain the problem. Practical, precise, and unimpressed by genius, she quickly discovers that broken clocks are the least of their worries.

Because in Brassward, paperwork does more than describe reality.

Sometimes it tells reality what to do.

As the anomaly spreads through transit systems, wages, permits, machinery, and government archives, Vex and Grimshaw must solve a mystery the Bureau has spent decades failing to understand.

The Improbable Alchemy of Archibald Vex is a witty, warm comic steampunk fantasy mystery packed with eccentric inventions, bureaucratic absurdity, sharp satire, capable characters, and a city discovering that "normal" may simply be whatever someone managed to get officially approved.

Approximately 85,000 words.