Meet the great Skulduggery Pleasant wise-cracking detective powerful magician master of dirty tricks & burglary (in the name of the greater good of course) Oh yeah & dead Then there's his sidekick Stephanie She's well she's a twelve-year-old girl With a pair like this on the case evil had better watch out So you won't keep anything from me again? He put his hand to his chest Cross my heart & hope to die Okay then Though you don't actually have a heart she said I know And technically you've already died I know that too Just so we're clear Stephanie's uncle Gordon is a writer of horror fiction But when he dies & leaves her his estate Stephanie learns that while he may have written horror it certainly wasn't fiction Pursued by evil forces intent on recovering a mysterious key Stephanie finds help from an unusual source
- the wisecracking skeleton of a dead wizard When all hell breaks loose it's lucky for Skulduggery that he's already dead Though he's about to discover that being a skeleton doesn't stop you from being tortured if the torturer is determined enough & if there's anything Skulduggery hates it's torture Will evil win the day? Will Stephanie & Skulduggery stop bickering long enough to stop it? One thing's for sure evil won't know what's hit it