First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is:
Skulduggery Pleasant rests his weary bones on the web at:
Derek Landy blogs under duress at
Text copyright © Derek Landy 2017
Skulduggery PleasantTM Derek Landy
Skulduggery Pleasant logoTM HarperCollinsPublishers
Skulduggery Pleasant © TM Derek Landy
Cover design © blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration © Tom Percival
Derek Landy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008169022
Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008219581
Version: 2019-04-15
This book is dedicated to Yve.
Yve, our friendship is like a fine wine: it improves with age, is fragrant and ebullient, and it has aromas of mulberries and pencil lead and …
No. No, that’s not it.
Our friendship is less like wine and more like a journey. It has twists and turns and sometimes you lose the signal for the radio and find yourself driving around in circles thanks to the cheap sat nav you bought from that guy with the …
No, that’s not it either.
Our friendship is less like wine, and less like a journey, and more like a … a …
Listen, Yve, they’re going to print in the morning and I have to get this dedication done in the next few minutes but I really can’t think of anything that adequately describes our friendship so it’d be much easier if we just weren’t friends any more.
Really sorry.
In the nothing before the beginning there was a thought. And the thought became the beginning.
Contents