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John Millen

The Bone Magician
By F.E. Higgins
Published by Macmillan Children's Books
ISBN 978 1 4050 9040 7
The delightfully spooky The Black Book of Secrets  was one of  last year's hits.   Highly entertaining, well written, and above all  different, it marked F.E. Higgins' talent  as something fresh in the sometimes stale world of youth fiction.
Black Book  is set in a city where everything is dark, miserable and wretched. There  are no rays of sunshine in Higgins' fictional world,  but it  is this  glum atmosphere that made  the debut  so appealing.
Higgins uses Urbs Umida, a city of doom and gloom where Black Book is set,  as the setting for her second novel, The Bone Magician.  The author is onto a winner by making this wonderful urban creation one of the chief players.
Young Pin Carpue is all alone in Urbs Umida. His mother is dead and his father is on the run after being accused of a murder Pin knows he did not commit. Times are dark. Pin earns a bit of money by watching over corpses at the local undertakers. His job is to check that they are really dead before  being buried.
Higgins starts the story  as she means to go on. Pin is lying half-drugged in the undertaker's cellar, but he can still see what is happening around him. He is  meant to be watching over a young woman who  died recently, but a group of dark figures have broken into the cellar and drugged him. What are they up to?
One of the men is Benedict Pantagus, the bone magician, who has the  power to raise a corpse from the dead for a short time. He has been paid to work his magic on the dead woman to allow her grieving boyfriend to spend a few last moments with her.
This is not the last time  Pin encounters the bone magician. Is the old man's magic real or is it all trickery? Pantagus'  young female assistant  Juno obviously knows more than she  tells Pin. Pin  wants to know more about the bone magician's dubious gifts,  but his curiosity soon leads him into terrible danger.
Pin is not the only one looking for answers in Urbs Umida. The whole city is more on edge than usual because the Silver Apple Killer is prowling the  streets and no one knows who his next victim will be.  To add to the fear, a hideous beast  in the cellar of the Nimble Finger Inn is just waiting for a chance to break out of its cage.
The Bone Magician is a delicious, shivery read with  very scary moments.  Higgins has a knack for black comedy and creating odd  figures like Deodonatus Snoad, who is so ugly he  can't show his face.
This is top-class  storytelling that will delight readers in the mood for something dark, edgy and jolly good fun.
John Millen can be contacted on MillenBookshelf@aol.com



Curiosity killed the cat - and gets a protagonist in trouble