When a Victorian fossil hunter discovers a baby pterodactyl, she vows to protect him with the help of a fellow scholar—her former fiancé—in this enchanting and transporting historical fantasy.Mary Anning wants to be a geomagician—a paleontologist who uses fossils to wield magic—but since the Geomagical Society of London refuses to admit women, she’s stuck selling her discoveries to tourists instead. When an ancient egg hatches in her hands, revealing a loveable baby pterodactyl Mary names Ajax, she knows this is the kind of scientific find that could make her career—if she’s strategic.Mary contacts the Society about her discovery, and they demand to take possession of Ajax. Their emissary is none other than Henry Stanton, a distinguished (and infuriatingly handsome) scholar... and the man who once broke Mary's heart.Henry claims he believes in the brilliant Mary, and that he only wants to help her obtain the respect she deserves. She knows she can't trust her fellow scholars, who want to discredit her and claim Ajax for their own—but can she even trust Henry, who seems intent on winning Mary back?Now Mary has a new mystery to solve that's buried deeper than any dinosaur She must uncover the secrets behind the Society and the truth about Henry. As her conscience begins to chafe against her ambition, Mary must decide what lengths she’s willing to go to finally belong—and what her heart really wants.

Who is Nellie Thorne and why does she keep disappearing? Jane Pye and Simon Mash are on the case in this cosy crime mystery novel, perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Robert Thorogood!'Gripping and laugh out loud funny, fans of Richard Osman will love it!' Jonathan Ross'A smart, funny and assured debut. Like the dish in the title, I devoured it in one sitting' Sue Perkins ----Dev Hooper arrives home from work to find his girlfriend, Nellie Thorne, has vanished. But she's not the first Nellie Thorne to disappear. In fact, she's the fifth in fifty years.Enter Jane Pye and Simon a millennial couple who signed up for a private detective night class on a whim. When they're assigned Dev's case for their coursework, they quickly realise they've bitten off more than they can chew.Armed with just six weeks of notes, matching trench coats, and a lot of enthusiasm, they set out to solve a case that has baffled Kent’s police for decades.What connects the missing Nellies? Why do locals whisper about a ghostly presence? Only the Pie & Mash Detective Agency can uncover the truth behind this eerie urban legend.Is it an open and shut case? Not on your Nellie…

Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist--an informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

On a split of land cut off by the Gulf, three Victorian summer houses stand against the encroaching sand. Two of the houses at Beldame are still used. The third house, filling with sand, is empty...except for the vicious horror which is shaping nightmares from the nothingness that hangs in the dank, fetid air. The McCrays and Savages, two fine Mobile families allied by marriage, have been coming to Beldame for years. This summer, with a terrible funeral behind them and a messy divorce coming up, even Luker McCray and little India down from New York are looking forward to being alone at Beldame. But they won't be alone. For something there, something they don't like to think about, is thinking about them...and about all the ways to make them die.