On the Nature of Magic

Spanning London's occult seances to the Parisian catacombs, two women claim to have seen Marie Antoinette's ghost in the garden of Versailles in this Gothic supernatural mystery where magic and science collide. 1902. Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for finding answers to the impossible, has started her own detective agency. The agency's first uncanny cases are both located in Paris - itself too much of a coincidence to ignore. First, two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. Then a young woman working at the mysterious Méliès Star Films studio has disappeared. As Helena and her colleague Eliza investigate, they uncover vanishings, impossible illusions, demons in the Catacombs and connections to the occult. To find the thread that connects the cases, Helena and Eliza must accept the natural world is darker, stranger than they could ever have imagined...

Marian Womack, author of 'The Golden Key' and 'The Swimmers', was born in Andalusia and educated in the UK. Her debut short story collection, Lost Objects (Luna Press, 2018) was shortlisted for two BSFA awards and one BFS award. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop, and she holds degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities. She writes at the intersection between weird and gothic fiction, and her stories normally deal with strange landscapes, ghostly encounters, or uncanny transformations. Marian lives in Cambridge, at the edge of the Fens, with her husband, their children and two aging Spanish cats. When she is not writing she can be found working as an academic librarian, or editing books and pamphlets in her indie publishing project, Calque Press.