Blood-and-thunder Victorian (with just a touch of steampunk) bliss by a genius we’d sell our souls to write like. Sally rides like a Cossack and shoots like a demon. Our kind of heroine, then. It all starts here. Sally’s first mystery. It begins with a death: her father has drowned at sea. Then Sally receives an anonymous letter. The dire warning it contains makes a second man die of fear at her feet. How did her father really die? The search for the truth plunges Sally into a terrifying mystery at the dark heart of Victorian London. One that reaches from a Maharajah’s Indian palace to the opium dens of China. At the centre of which glitters a deadly blood-soaked jewel… Delicious historical melodrama from Philip PullmanPhilip is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogyA thrilling tale of cursed rubies and murderous gangsPhilip has won the Carnegie Medal and Whitbread PrizeSupplied as a pack of six copies.