Our protagonists-a very happily married couple-are relatable and complex. Bancroft's writing is at his best here, a perfect blend of 10 dollar words and yeoman's prose. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose to nose with a violent antiroyalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.Īrmed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for whatever springs from the alleys, graves, and shadows next.Ī really, really delightful read. Well-acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.īut when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake-going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven-the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney-wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. The Hexologists, Iz and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. The first book in a wildly entertaining new fantasy series from acclaimed author Josiah Bancroft where a married couple team up to solve magical, and often quite odd, mysteries.
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