Sarah Monette

Mélusine — a city of secrets and lies, pleasure and pain, magic and corruption — and destinies lost and found. Felix Harrowgate is a dashing, highly respected wizard. But his aristocratic peers don't know his dark past — how his abusive former master enslaved him, body and soul, and trained him to pass as a nobleman. Within the walls of the Mirador — Melusine's citadel of power and wizardry — Felix believed he was safe. He was wrong. Now, the horrors of his previous life have found him and threaten to destroy all he has since become. Mildmay the Fox is used to being hunted. Raised as a kept-thief and trained as an assassin, he escaped his Keeper long ago and lives on his own as a cat burglar. But now he has been caught by a mysterious foreign wizard using a powerful calling charm. And yet the wizard was looking not for Mildmay — but for Felix Harrowgate. Thrown together by fate, the broken wizard Felix and the wanted killer Mildmay journey far from Melusine through lands thick with strange magics and terrible demons of darkness. But it is the shocking secret from their pasts, linking them inexorably together, that will either save them, or destroy them.

Kyle Murchison Booth, archivist at the Parrington Museum, has heard of Thirdhop Scarp. Everyone has. The house has been notorious ever since the night that homeowner J.A. Cathcart murdered his entire family, and was found cupping the heart of his eldest daughter in his hands as tenderly as he would a wounded bird. It is not the first time the house has experienced unsettling events. And it will not be the last. Now the new owner of Thirdhop Scarp, one Marcus Oleander, is gathering an esoteric order at the house, including Miss Griselda Parrington, daughter of the museum's founder. The museum director demands that Mr Booth discredit Oleander's occult teachings and end his influence over the credulous Miss Parrington. Reluctantly, Mr Booth joins the weekend séance. In the beautiful but eerie surrounds of the house and gardens, Mr Booth is drawn into an investigation that spans years - and reveals the house to be much, much more than it seems...

The dead and the monstrous will not leave Kyle Murchison Booth alone, for an unwilling foray into necromancy has made him sensitive to--and attractive to--the creatures who roam the darkness of his once-safe world. Ghosts, ghouls, incubi: all have one thing in common. They know Booth for one of their own . . .