At the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr, every mage with the healer’s gift has five years to master their power and to prepare for the infamous Grand Exam --- a five-day trial whose results will determine their entire future. The list of exam rules includes: You will perform five practical cases. Your exam group is chosen at random. You pass together, or fail together. It does not include: On the first day, your exam group will find a classmate's dead body in the exam hall. And as they will soon discover, this particular group all have something to hide...and all have a connection with the dead girl, a brilliant scholar who would have been first in their class.

Ella is a haunting. Murdered at 16, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father's house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters. Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died. Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched. You think you know Ella's story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince. You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.

After the death of his twin sister, Jack Alston, Lord Hawthorn, thought he was done with magic for good. But with the threat of a dangerous ritual hanging over every magician in Britain, he’s drawn reluctantly back into that world. Now Jack is living in a bizarre puzzle-box of a magical London townhouse, helping an unlikely group of friends track down the final piece of the Last Contract before their enemies can do the same. And to make matters worse, they need the help of writer and thief Alan Ross, who is only in this for the money. When a plot to seize unimaginable power comes to a head at Cheetham Hall --- Jack’s ancestral family estate --- Jack, Alan and their allies will become entangled in a night of champagne, secrets and bloody sacrifice.

Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She expected plenty of it when she volunteered to serve as an old lady’s companion on an ocean liner, in order to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy that began generations ago. What she didn’t expect was for the old lady in question to turn up dead on the first day of the voyage. Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham, who’s also returning home to England. Violet is everything that Maud has been trained to distrust yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress and a magnet for scandal.

Robin Blyth is the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents’ excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what’s been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he’s always known. Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it --- not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles --- and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.