THE EMPEROR IN THE CITIES OF DANGER [The Emperor’s Secret Files] by Charles Lee Jackson II

At last, the event Charles Lee Jackson II's fans have been waiting for! After chronicling the origins of half a dozen new super heroes and heroines, he once again turns his pen to the adventures of his supreme creation, The Emperor, the first superhero who worked without a costume, wearing a jacket and tie instead. Now, the man with super powers who would rather dine with a fascinating woman than fight bad guys (but watch out, bad guys, if he gets you in his sights) is back to face peril beyond imagining. In the newest installment in the Emperor saga, he journeys to four legendary cities famed for their mysteries and dangers, and finds death lurking around every corner. It's just another vacation—for the man who travels in crime!

Visiting the Bay Area, The Emperor joins Shanghai Lil to solve a series of puzzling acts of piracy. Add up a recent widow, Lombard Street, sea shanties, and Alcatraz with a new gang of criminals, and see what happens to The Emperor in San Francisco. Invited to Mardi Gras, The Emperor and Shanghai Lil are to be the king and queen of a krewe’s parade. But while they’re trying to enjoy themselves for a change, the inexplicable theft of souvenir doubloons leads to trouble for The Emperor in New Orleans. There the pair take on new villains from the mysterious gang known only as Tsodiac, unraveling the strange circumstances behind the stolen doubloons, while solving a series of ritual stranglings. Then The Emperor's visit to Lil in Seattle leads to more trouble as they investigate the serial killings of homeless people along Skid Road. But there's more to the murders than meets the eye and the trail leads to disguises, cults, deviltry and a perilous trip underground for The Emperor in Hidden City.

Plus, a bonus Emperor exploit: A brief but deadly encounter results when The Emperor rides the rails on a clandestine trip to Santa Fe to collect the last bar of CL-arium, the secret gravity-defying metal he invented. Aboard the train he and young Alison Carlson (the costumed heroine known as Shooting Star) interrupt a new masked menace, the Wizard, a man with uncanny powers, attempting to steal the CL-arium. But despite the Emperor's fast action and fast thinking, he is outwitted for once. Will there be a return match in the future…?

Charles Lee Jackson II's brainchild, The Emperorvese, with its dozens of costumed and super heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses first appeared in a series of alternative comic books in the late 1960s. Then, in the '90s, Mr. Jackson began to retell those adventures in a series of pulp novels written for a number of small press 'zines. Now, for the first time ever, the Amazing Adventures of The Emperor and its companion series, The Emperor's Secret Files—featuring his other characters like Fireball, Solara, the Titan, Shooting Star, Nemesis, and more—are at last being published in book form.