Using magic means it uses you back - and every spell exacts a price from the user. Some people, however, get out of it by Offloading the cost of magic onto an innocent, then Allison Beckstrom's job is to identify the spell-caster. Allie would rather live a hand-to-mouth existence than accept the family fortune and the strings that come with it, but when she finds a boy dying from a magical Offload that has her father's signature all over it she is thrown back into the world of his black magic.
They've been given just one week to find a killer they'd caught once before ...Arthur Bryant, John May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit are on the trail of an enigma: a young man called Mr Fox. But his identity is false, his links to society are invisible and his home yields no clues. All they know is that somehow he escaped from a locked room and murdered one of their best and brightest. Now the detectives are being lured down into the darkest recesses of the London Underground where their quarry, expertly disguised, has struck again.
The Peculiar Crimes Unit is no more. After years of defying the odds and infuriating their embarrassed superiors, detectives Arthur Bryant and John May have at last crossed the line. This is the twenty-first century and not even their eccentric genius or phenomenal success rate solving London's most unusual crimes can save them. While Bryant takes to his bed, his bathrobe, and his esoteric books, the rest of the team take to the streets looking for new careers - leading one of them to stumble upon a gruesome murder.
One night, Arthur Bryant witnesses a drunk middle-aged lady coming out of a pub in a London backstreet. The next morning, she is found dead at the exact spot where their paths crossed. Even more disturbing, there's a twist: the pub has vanished and the street itself has changed. Bryant is convinced that he saw them as they looked over a century before, but the elderly detective has already lost the funeral urn of an old friend. Could he be losing his mind as well?
Following the successful capture of "The Highwayman" plans are still afoot to shut down the Peculiar Crimes Unit, and prevent any more embarrassing press coverage. Bryant and May set off for Devon to attend a Spiritualist Conference and have a well-earned break. Whilst they're on their way they get caught in severe weather conditions and back at the unit one of the team is murdered. DS Janet Longbright is acting Head of the department and has to use everything she has learned from the elderly detectives in order to exonerate the other officers at the unit.
