The Mystery Cats: A Guardian of London Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798249368883)

London keeps its secrets underground.

When forensic scientist Amber is called to a Bermondsey flat to examine a retired man found dead in his chair, the scene is wrong in small, precise ways. His shirt buttoned incorrectly. His socks on the wrong feet. A playing card - nine of spades - tucked under the bed.

She has two colleagues no one else can see. Holmes, grey-striped and analytical. Watson, tortoiseshell and perceptive. Together they read what the evidence won't say aloud.

As more deaths surface across East London - each staged with the same eerie care, each marked with the same card - Amber begins to understand that the murders aren't random. They follow a geometry. A Victorian geometry, mapped along the Thames, designed to seal something hidden beneath the city permanently.

London has a secret layer. Pockets where the past hasn't finished with the present. Courtyards where gaslight still burns. Streets that remember what happened in 1888.

Someone is completing a mechanism begun over a century ago. And the five people who could have stopped it are already dead.

The Mystery Cats is the first book in the Guardian of London series - a literary crime novel for readers who love Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, and the quiet, accumulated dread of a city that knows more than it tells.

Perfect for fans of: Rivers of London - Piranesi - The Bone Clocks - Thursday Murder Club - The Dictionary of Lost Words