Not that long ago, I read The Black Book of Secrets, and really liked it. This is a paraquel to it. Which means, essentially, that the stories were taking place roughly at the same time, in the same fictional country, and have some overlapping points that you'll only realize if you read both books, but otherwise can be read entirely independently. And I liked this one, too, every bit as much as The Black Book of Secrets. This one is set entirely in the fictional, Victorian London-esque city that The Black Book starts in. I liked the new characters, and I'll be interested to see how the two stories collide in a later book. This one has a few more elements of the fantastic about it than The Black Book, though. That was the one thing that I felt could have been developed better. The actual bone magician part seems to take a back seat in the story to the Jack the Ripper-inspired murder plot. If that was meant to be mysterious, it failed, as I never felt the least bit of suspense about what the end result would be. I suspect that it wasn't meant to be a true mystery, though. There is a true mystery left at the end of the book, and I suspect future books in the universe to touch on them.