The Black Book of Secrets

F. E. Higgins

Fantasy Young Adult

"Wonderful. Anyone looking for the next big thing has come to the right place. Higgins has created a uniquely grim fantasy world that more than holds its own with Dickens or Peake. Her characters are brilliantly realised and the story grabs at the reader with hooked talons" – Eoin Colfer

When Ludlow Fitch's parents cruelly betray him, he steals away on the back of a carriage and leaves behind the stinking City. He arrives in the dead of night at a remote village, where he crosses paths with the tall and limping figure of Joe Zabbidou – a pawnbroker with a difference. For Joe trades secrets, not goods, for cash.

Employed as Joe's assistant, Ludlow records the villagers' fiendish confessions in an ancient leather-bound volume: "The Black Book of Secrets". There's the gravedigger who has been resurrecting bodies; the butcher who made a mouse-meat pie for his bullying father, with fatal consequences; the wizened bookseller who went to murderous lengths to get her hands on a priceless tome.

Ludlow longs to trust his mysterious master, but he senses Joe has much to hide. But then Ludlow Fitch has his own, very dark, secrets...

 

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Published
2007
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Author

F. E. Higgins

F. E. Higgins has been fascinated by the macabre ever since seeing a ghostly apparition as a child. Nowadays F. E. travels the lands that these books describe, collecting strange artefacts and the even stranger secrets and stories behind them. The Black Book of Secrets and The Bone Magician, the first results of these eerie explorations, have sold all over the world. When not in pursuit of a story, F. E. may be found in a haunted house in Kent. She sits with quill in hand, a false leg beside her and from the mantelpiece an eyeball watches the words she forms on the page.