In The Inventor Prince, Elliot Shepherd's world is built on steel—literally.

By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia had earned its reputation as the “Workshop of the World.” Its factories produced an extraordinary range of goods, from locomotives and machinery to precision instruments and industrial equipment.

The industrialists were the technology pioneers of their day.

Long before Silicon Valley, men like Andrew Carnegie were transforming American industry. Their innovations created fortunes, changed cities, and introduced fierce competition into an already rapidly changing world.

Elliot Shepherd, the fictional industrialist at the heart of The Inventor Prince, belongs to that ambitious era.

But progress came at a terrible human cost.

Steelmaking was dangerous, exhausting work. Laborers faced intense heat, heavy machinery, long shifts, and the constant possibility of serious injury. The same furnaces that helped build America's industrial future could claim the lives of the men who operated them.

And that brings us to one mystery in The Inventor Prince: Elliot's father's fatal fall into a furnace.

In an age when industrial accidents were an ever-present danger, how could anyone be certain whether a death was accidental?

Sometimes the most unsettling details in historical fiction are the ones rooted in reality.

Explore the world of Elliot Shepherd in The Inventor Prince, part of the Barriers of Stone series.