Fiddlehead

Fiddlehead is the sixth and concluding novel in Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century, pulling the series' scattered threads into a single Washington-centered conspiracy thriller. It follows Gideon Bardsley, a formerly enslaved inventor whose calculating machine predicts that the twenty-year Civil War is feeding a zombie apocalypse that will destroy North and South alike.

The novel brings Abraham Lincoln, wheelchair-bound survivor of Ford's Theatre, and former spy Maria 'Belle' Boyd into a plot to expose the industrialists and officials profiting from prolonging both the war and the Blight-borne plague. Priest shifts register from adventure to political intrigue and race-against-time thriller, tying together the rotters, the sap trade, and the machinery introduced across the earlier books.

As a finale, Fiddlehead delivers the series' thematic payoff about war, exploitation, and the dead as a shared enemy. It is best read last.