Emily Darkwood is already resisting Victorian society's expectations of her as a woman of the upper classes, when she receives a strange and life-changing inheritance in the wake of her missing parents. A stone of amber that draws her into mysteries, supernatural, cosmic, and criminal. Armed with this guide stone, her wits, revolver, sword-stick umbrella, and faithful servant-companion, the streetwise, scrappy, and young Jack Hobbs, she determines to challenge the mysteries and threats she encounters in her search to understand the origin and power of the stone and its connection to her parents—and their fates. Yet dark forces conspire against her, and her drive for answers and her fight against the darkness of the world risks fought for medical studies, her friends, family—and her life.
The Darkwood Mysteries are a series of short-stories, novellas, and novels that can largely be enjoyed as standalone tales of horror and adventure from any point, or together in order as part of a deeper mystery.
The Cult of the Scarab is a short story in the series.
Darkwood attends the unwrapping of a mummified ancient Egyptian at the British Museum. The spectacle is soon followed by the brutal death of a museum attendant and a missing mummy. How do the events connect to Darkwood's nightmarish visions of metallic beetles swarming a foreign red land? The answer is found in death...