"In a slightly alternate London in 1983, Susan Arkshaw is looking for her father, a man she never met. Crime boss Frank Thringley might be able to help her, but Susan doesn't get time to ask Frank any questions before he is turned to dust by the prick of a silver hatpin in the hands of the outrageously attractive Merlin. Merlin is a young left-handed bookseller (one of the fighting ones), who with the right-handed handed booksellers (the intellectual ones), he belongs to an extended family of magical beings who police the mythic and legendary Old World when it intrudes the modern world -- in addition to running several bookshops. Susan's search for her father begins with her mother's possibly misremembered or misspelled surnames, a reading-room ticket, and a silver cigarette case engraved with something that might be a coat of arms. Merlin has a quest of his own: to find the Old World entity who used ordinary criminals to kill his mother. As he and his sister, Vivien, tread in the path of a botched or covered-up police investigation from years past, they find this quest stangely overlaps with Susan's"--Jacket flap.