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 Spindly-Snatcher is a novella in the series.
Why is a writer burning down bookshops? Why does insanity and death surround the answer? Darkwood and Hobbs investigate a creeping madness that no asylum can tame or contain, and in doing so they find a terrible something stalking between fear and insanity. To know of the Spindly-Snatcher is to be known to it—have the hunters become the hunted?