Urban Historical

Hex is a visceral depiction of what happens when a society is consumed by fear and superstition, exploring how the terrible force of a king's violent crusade against ordinary women can still be felt, right up to the present day.

During the wedding festivities of his king, Cyan Dag, a knight of Gloinmere, is sought out by a mysterious bard and told a terrifying tale: that the king has married a false queen - a lie cloaked in ancient and powerful sorcery. Spurred on by his steadfast honor and loyalty, Cyan departs on a dangerous quest to rescue the real queen from her tower prison, to prevent war, and to awaken magic in a land that has lost its way.

It's 1964. Eleven-year-old Fin and his glamorous, worldly, older half sister, Lady, have just been orphaned, and Lady, whom Fin hasn't seen in six years, is now his legal guardian and his only hope. That means Fin is uprooted from a small dairy farm in rural Connecticut to Greenwich Village, smack in the middle of the swinging '60s. He soon learns that Lady-giddy, careless, urgent, and obsessed with being free-is as much his responsibility as he is hers.

Thelma Foy, a jeweler with the Second Sight in iron-bedecked 1890s New Orleans, wasn't expecting to be caught in a faery conflict. Tam can see through the glamours faeries wear to hide themselves from mortals, but if her secret were revealed, the fey would steal her eyes, her life, or her freedom. So, Tam doesn't respond when they trail thorn-crusted fingertips through her hair at the French Market or when the Dark King sings along with her in the bayou. But when the Dark King, Irial, rescues her, Tam must confront everything she thought she knew about faeries, men, and love.

In an ill-fated attempt to prevent the tyrannical Emperor from rekindling war with the gods, young rebel Foolish Cur made the dreadful mistake of wielding incredibly powerful but forbidden magic. In doing so, he himself fell into a trap of the gods' own making, inadvertently setting them free. Now, after uncountable years, the gods are free to wreak their own chaos upon the world, transforming the lands into a nightmare for mortals while horrific new creatures emerge to terrorize all in their path. The Empire, the rebellion, and existence itself stand on the brink of destruction.

In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family. Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street. Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck.

It's the spring of 1887, and Rose Gallagher is finally coming into her own. She's the proud owner of a lovely little home near Washington Square, where she lives with her mother and friend Pietro, and she's making a name for herself as a Pinkerton agent with a specialty in things...otherworldly. She and her partner Thomas are working together better than ever, and mostly managing to push aside romantic feelings for one another. Mostly.

When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England. But Emily's father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily's beloved but foolish and dissolute brother.

Johnny Maxwell and his friends have to do something when they find Mrs Tachyon, the local bag lady, semi-conscious in an alley...as long as it's not the kiss of life. But there's more to Mrs Tachyon than a squeaky trolley and a bunch of dubious black bags. Somehow she holds the key to different times, different ears: including the Blackbury Blitz in 1941. Suddenly, now isn't the safe place Johnny once thought it was as he finds himself caught up more and more with then.

Once there were hundreds of members of the Oversight, the brave souls who guard the borders between the mundane and the magic. Now there are only five. When a vagabond brings a screaming girl to the Oversight's London headquarters, she could answer their hopes for new recruit, or she could be the instrument of their downfall.

In late 19th-century Chicago, visionary retail tycoon Marshall Field made his fortune wooing women customers with his famous motto, "Give the lady what she wants." His legendary charm also won the heart of socialite Delia Spencer and led to an infamous love affair.

Cathy and Will are now the Duchess and Duke of Londinium, the biggest Fae-touched Nether city, but they have different ideas of what their authority offers. Pressured by his Fae patron, Lord Iris, Will struggles to maintain total control whilst knowing he must have a child with his difficult wife. Cathy wants to muscle the Court through 200 years of social change and free it from its old-fashioned moral strictures. But Cathy learns just how dangerous it can be for a woman who dares to speak out.

Cathy has been forced into an arranged marriage with William Iris - a situation that comes with far more strings than even she could have anticipated, especially when she learns of his family’s intentions for them both. Meanwhile, Max and the gargoyle investigate the Agency - a mysterious organization that appears to play by its own twisted rules, none of them favourable to Society. And in Mundanus, Sam has discovered something very peculiar about his wife’s employer - something that could herald disaster for everyone on both sides of the Split Worlds.

On a freezing Christmas Eve in 1879, a forensic psychic reader is summoned from her Baker Street lodgings to the scene of a questionable death. Alexandrina Victoria Pendlebury (named after her godmother, the current queen of England) is adamant that the death in question is a magically compromised murder and not a suicide, as the police had assumed. After the shocking revelation contained by the body in question, Alex must put her personal loss aside to uncover the deeper issues at stake, before more bodies turn up.

It's the end of the 19th century. San Francisco's cobblestone streets are haunted, but Chinatown has an unlikely protector in a young Daoist priestess named Li-lin. Using only her martial arts training, spiritual magic, a sword made from peachwood, and the walking, talking spirit of a human eye, Li-lin stands alone to defend her immigrant community from supernatural threats. But when the body of a young girl is brought to the deadhouse Li-lin oversees for a local group of gangsters, she faces her most bewildering - and potentially dangerous - assignment yet.

Jeremiah Gallow is just another construction worker, and that's the way he likes it. He's left his past behind, but some things cannot be erased. Like the tattoos on his arms that transform into a weapon or that he was once closer to the Queen of Summer than any half human should be. Now the half-sidhe all in Summer once feared is dragged back into the world of enchantment, danger, and fickle fae - by a woman who looks uncannily like his dead wife.

In Prague researching the legend of the Golem, a fantastical "living" creature made of clay, archaeologist Annja Creed is faced with an even bigger mystery on her hands when someone begins murdering the homeless. And every day there's a fresh corpse. As the suspicion that Golem is behind the deaths circulates quietly on the streets of the city, Annja cannot resist unraveling the thread that binds science to superstition. According to Czech history, these aren't new attacks.

Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, were Conductors on the Underground Railroad, ferrying dozens of slaves to freedom with daring, cunning, and magic that draws its power from the constellations. With the war over, those skills find new purpose as they solve mysteries and murders that White authorities would otherwise ignore. In the heart of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, everyone knows that when there’s a strange death or magical curses causing trouble, Hetty and Benjy are the only ones who can solve the case.

In the days before the Civil War, there lived in New Orleans the gens de couleur libre - copper-skinned half-castes, liberated by their "owners," but confined by their color to a life of political non-existence and social subordination. Here is a compelling and richly textured tale of a people forever caught in the shadows between black and white.

As war rages in 1944, young army lieutenant Lucas Athan recovers a sarcophagus excavated from an Egyptian tomb. Shipped to Princeton University for study, the box contains mysteries that only Lucas, aided by brilliant archaeologist Simone Rashid, can unlock. These mysteries may, in fact, defy - or fulfill - the dire prophecies of Albert Einstein himself.