A Sally Lockhart Mystery #1: The Ruby in the Smoke

Blood-and-thunder Victorian (with just a touch of steampunk) bliss by a genius we’d sell our souls to write like. Sally rides like a Cossack and shoots like a demon. Our kind of heroine, then. It all starts here. Sally’s first mystery. It begins with a death: her father has drowned at sea. Then Sally receives an anonymous letter. The dire warning it contains makes a second man die of fear at her feet. How did her father really die? The search for the truth plunges Sally into a terrifying mystery at the dark heart of Victorian London. One that reaches from a Maharajah’s Indian palace to the opium dens of China. At the centre of which glitters a deadly blood-soaked jewel…

  • Delicious historical melodrama from Philip Pullman
  • Philip is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy
  • A thrilling tale of cursed rubies and murderous gangs
  • Philip has won the Carnegie Medal and Whitbread Prize

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  • Photo of Philip Pullman

    Philip Pullman

    Philip Pullman is probably the world’s most acclaimed living children’s author, best known for the trilogy of books known as His Dark Materials.

    Awards

    Philip won the Nestle Smarties award for both Clockwork and The Firework Maker’s Daughter. Northern Lights was published in hardback in July 1995. That year, it won the Carnegie Medal and Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and was Children’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

    The Amber Spyglass won WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year 2000 at the British Book Awards, was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal and was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2001. Philip Pullman was voted Whitaker Author of the Year by the Booksellers Association. The Amber Spyglass went on to win both Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and Whitbread Book of the Year 2001 and in doing so became the first children’s book to win the main prize in the award’s history.

    Philip has also been recognised with two major awards for his contribution to literature: the Eleanor Farjeon award in 2002, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize in 2005.

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