Secrets of the Fire Sea
Murder mystery on isolated Jago — a volcanic ocean, buried secrets and a truth worth killing for.
About this book
The island of Jago survives behind a ring of magma and an old atmospheric defence that is starting to fail. Its people are leaving. Its politics are turning ugly. Then the murders begin.
Jago is the most isolated state in the Jackelian world: an island ringed by the Fire Sea, kept habitable by an ancient breathable-air system that nobody now alive fully understands. Once it was a great power. Now it is a contracting one, and contraction has consequences.
Hannah Conquest is an orphan of the island's clerical class. Jethro Daunt is a defrocked Circlist vicar with a private speciality in murder. Boxiron is the steamman knight whose damaged body and undamaged mind back him up. Together they walk into an investigation that begins as a private inquiry and finishes as something with theological, archaeological and political dimensions the island's establishment would much rather keep buried.
The setting is the closest the cycle gets to a locked-room mystery, and Hunt uses the contraction to give the book the most atmosphere of any Jackelian novel.
Introduces Jethro Daunt and Boxiron, the cycle's recurring detective double act. Brings Jago into the foreground and establishes the deeper archaeology of the world's pre-human civilisations.
- you want the Jackelian world in a detective register;
- you like Sherlock Holmes and Chesterton's Father Brown;
- you want a stand-alone with a real mystery plot under it.