"You did not tell the Abbess a single lie," Diamond said, "but you didn't tell her the truth."

As a good Sombrist, Hunter Sessaire is aware that not only lying, but curiosity, is very much frowned upon by his community. As an apprentice archivist, he cannot resist the temptation to puzzle out how a manuscript could have been stolen from the room within the Sombrists' Labyrinth. A room that opens only during a planetary alignment. An alignment that has not yet taken place.

But this is not the only enigma abroad in Muinbeo. Seemingly disparate occurrences remain opaque even to those normally in the know. Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe is scratching his head over the inexplicable vanishing of his apprentice, Salmon Farsade, and the dramatic and destructive theft of an ancient silver hand from the local school museum.

The boundaries of Muinbeo, carefully managed to keep the Outland and its machinations outside, where they belong, have become a bit more porous than McCabe would like. Not least when he begins to suspect that some of the uncanny events may have their roots in a controversial Outland archaeological dig in Aegypt... Once again we are led into a maze of mystery by those not entirely reliable narrators, the Storytellers, in this enthralling sequel to Good Red Herring.

For readers of all ages.

Susan Maxwell is an independent author and scholar who has had short stories and poetry published in magazines and anthologies; has published a short story collection (Fluctuation in Disorder) independently; has had one novel (Good Red Herring) published by Little Island Books, and a further three (Hollowmen, And the Wildness, and A Wild Goose Hunt) published independently; has served on fiction and non-fiction juries for the British Fantasy Awards; has a PhD in Archival Science and writes on themes related to archives and fiction; reviews regularly for Inis (the magazine of Children's Books Ireland); is influenced most by speculative and modernist fiction, being particularly fond of Flann O'Brien, Calvino, Beckett, and Woolf.

When not writing, or painting, or being an archivist, the author can be found in the vegetable patch, listening to music, reading books, watching old detective series, or catching up on sleep.