Secret Chapter

In this bookish fantasy adventure, a Librarian spy must fall in with a villainous group to achieve her goals. Imagine Ocean’s Eleven meets James Bond with a pinch of magic. The Secret Chapter is the sixth novel in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series.Irene and Kai have to team up with an unlikely band of misfits to pull off an amazing art heist. Or they must risk the wrath of a dangerous villain, in his secret island lair. . .As Irene tries to manage a fraught Fae–dragon truce and her overbearing parents, she’s given a hot new mission. The world where she grew up is in danger and only one book can save it.This is held by Mr Nemo, secretive Fae villain and antique dealer, so Irene and Kai travel to his Caribbean retreat to strike a deal. But in return for the book, they must steal a painting from twenty-first-century Vienna. They’ll join a team of dragons, Fae gamblers and thieves, so their greatest challenge may be one another. And some will kill to protect this painting, which hides an extraordinary secret from a past age.

The ensuing shenanigans are wittily told, with some great one-liners and comic set pieces, and the resourceful Irene is a delightful protagonist. This is light-hearted fantasy at its page-turning best, I absolutely loved this . . . flavoured with truly unique mythology and a dash of the eldritch. Such clever, creepy, elaborate worldbuilding and snarky, sexy-smart characters!, Irene is a great heroine: fiery, resourceful and no one’s fool, she has a wonderfully droll sense of humour – much like the novel itself, Brilliant and so much fun. Skullduggery, Librarians, and dragons – Cogman keeps upping the ante on this delightful series!, Reminiscent of the works of Diana Wynne Jones and Neil Gaiman . . a true treat to read

Genevieve Cogman started on Tolkien and Sherlock Holmes at an early age, and has never looked back. But on a perhaps more prosaic note, she has an MSc in Statistics with Medical Applications and has wielded this in an assortment of jobs: clinical coder, data analyst and classifications specialist. Although The Invisible Library was her debut novel, she previously worked as a freelance roleplaying-game writer. She is also the author of The Masked City, The Burning Page, The Lost Plot, and The Mortal Word, all in the Invisible Library series. Genevieve Cogman’s hobbies include patchwork, beading, knitting and gaming, and she lives in the north of England.