First published 2013
New York City, the 1950s. A woman walks into Magnus Bane's life with a photograph and a desperate plea: find her son Raphael, a Manhattan teenager who has vanished without a trace. Magnus takes the case. He moves through the city, following whatever thread he can pull, and what he finds is not what the mother imagined. Raphael Santiago is alive, but the version of alive he now inhabits is something his mother never prepared for. Magnus knows this world. He has lived long enough to understand what Raphael has become and what that means for a young man who had a whole life in front of him. The question is not simply where Raphael is. The question is whether anything can be done for him now, and whether Magnus is the right person to do it. At its center, this is a story about a warlock who has seen too much deciding whether one more person is worth the effort of saving, and finding that the answer matters more than he expected.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, fantasy, dark-fantasy, urban-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, introspective, melancholic, mysterious, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, mentor-figure, moral-dilemma, redemption-arc
Setting: New York City, Manhattan
Period: 1950s
40 pages · ebook · Margaret K. McElderry Books
Content warnings: death