In a slightly alternate London in 1983 Susan Arkshaw is looking for her father a man she has never met Crime boss Frank Thringley might be able to help her but Susan doesn’t get time to ask Frank any questions before he is turned to dust by the prick of a silver hatpin in the hands of the outrageously attractive Merlin Merlin is a young left-handed bookseller one of the fighting ones who with the right-handed booksellers the intellectual ones are an extended family of magical beings who police the mythic and legendary Old World when it intrudes on the modern world in addition to running several bookshops Susan’s search for her father begins with her mother’s possibly misremembered or misspelt surnames a reading room ticket and a silver hip flask engraved with something that might be a coat of arms Merlin has a quest of his own to find the Old World entity who used ordinary criminals to kill his mother As he and his sister the right-handed bookseller Vivien tread in the path of a botched or covered-up police investigation from years past they find this quest strangely overlaps with Susan’s Who or what was her father? Susan Merlin and Vivien must find out as the Old World erupts dangerously into the New