"One city, one day, and a battle of wills reaches boiling point
Joseph Severin, a respectable North London businessman, has a lucrative side job. He's doing the books, old school (because these days the only trail you can't trace is a paper one) for a rogue MI5 outfit, the Shadows, headed by psychopathic Sebastien. However, when the game is rumbled, Sebastien sends hitman Mr Phipps to kill Severin and get those books back. The spider web of collateral damage will be extensive, taking in Lottie, for whom Severin has developed a sudden, wild passion; Sonya, a Russian escort with a desperate deadline; and at MI5, the ambitious Ellerby, who has them all in her sights."
"On a London bound train, a young man sees a silver ankle bracelet on an old lady's ankle. Fascinated, he persuades her to tell him the story behind it over a cup of tea. Of her love affair with an American in Amsterdam 30 years before. How, after three days, he gave her the bracelet. What happened next.
'She tells the young man in a London cafe a story that begins in an Amsterdam bar. How a young woman looked up when asked a simple question and the world reshaped. It was the eyes, the shock of them. Feline. Almond lozenges. The left one perfectly centered, the other offset. Eyes like a question, beyond the one asked. The breath she gathered for a polite refusal left her. She knew she'd have to take some back soon. What had he asked, this big man with the soft voice and the eyes that don't match? Something about a seat?'"
"The Unicorn Tapestries in New York are a medieval masterpiece—and a mystery. No one knows who wove them, who for, or when.
Elayne knows . . . kinda. At least, she’s been told by her father that their ancestor wove them. Not only that, he left a doorway in the tapestries which opens onto Goloth, the Land of the Fabulous Beasts. She doesn’t believe any of it—until, on a class trip to the museum, she is summoned through the tapestries by Moonspill. A real, live unicorn.
Moonspill and her weaver-ancestor had made a pact: that if either of them were desperate, they (or their descendants) would come to the other’s aid. Moonspill’s mate is about to be slaughtered in the arena by a tyrant king. He needs a maiden to tame him so he can enter the world of man and free her.
Elayne knows nothing about taming—she barely passed calculus! But through some extreme adventures in that magical land she realizes something: if human myths are true in Goloth, why not the one where a unicorn can cure all poisons—including the cancer in her father’s blood?
Attacked by a griffin, befriended by a talking snake, pursued by a lecherous king, Elayne must somehow find the skills and the courage she needs to save the two beings she loves most in either world: her father and her unicorn.
'The Hunt of the Unicorn' is one of the best fantasy books to be written in the last few years... by weaving historical elements into the modern world, the author has created a parallel world of wondrous beasts such as the types that would be found in medieval bestiary.' CM Magazine"
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