Helen Capel is hired as a live-in lady-help to the Warren family in the countryside. She enjoys the eccentric household and her duties, but her peaceful and simple life is soon disturbed by a series of mysterious murders in the isolated community. As Helen’s employer, Professor Sebastian Warren, battens down the hatches and locks all the doors of their remote country house, the eight residents begin to feel safe. But somewhere out there lurks a murderer of young girls. As the murders crawl closer to home, Helen starts to wonder if there really is safety in numbers—and what happens when those numbers start to dwindle? About the Author Novelist and short story writer Ethel White was born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876. She worked for the government at the Ministry of Pensions in London and began writing fiction in the 1920s. She made her writing debut with the mainstream novel The Wish-Bone (1927). After two more mainstream novels, Twill Soon Be Dark (1929) and The Eternal Journey (1930), she began writing thriller and mystery novels, where her popularity flourished for the next 14 years. Her novel The Spiral Staircase was made into a film by director Robert Sidomark, but White's best-known and most successful work remains The Wheel Spins, on which Hitchcock based his film The Lady Vanishes. The Lady Vanishes was remade in the 1970s and starred Cybil Shepherd. More recently, The Lady Vanishes has enjoyed a successful run as a play.

Rosa Mandolini knows in her heart that her family are the greatest painters of magical illuminations in the city. But the eccentric Studio Mandolini has fallen on hard times and the future is no longer certain. While trying to help her family, Rosa discovers a strange magical box protected by a painted crow. But when she finds a way to open the box, she accidentally releases the Scarling, a vicious monster determined to destroy the Mandolini family at any cost. With the aid of her former best friend and a painted crow named Payne, it’s up to Rosa to stop the Scarling before it unmakes the magical paintings that keep the city running, and hopefully save her family in the process!