Barnaby Grimes

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The creators of the Edge Chronicles, author Paul Stewart and illustrator Chris Riddell, have created a new series featuring Barnaby Grimes, a tick-tock lad, who “highstacks” across the tall buildings of Dickensian London to deliver messages, documents, and other items as contracted to do for its businessmen and residents.

In the first of the series, Curse of the Night Wolf, Barnaby is attached by an enormous dog and soon finds himself in the world of a very unusual doctor who dispenses a special cordial to the poor and unknown, and a lady seamstress who creates fashions with the much-desired “Wesphalian Trim.”

After delivery a strange parcel to a boy’s school headmaster, Barnaby becomes concerned when he finds that the students have imprisoned the master and are dressed in feathers and war paint. In the Return of the Emerald Skull, he must solve the puzzle of the school before it is too late for the headmaster.

Barnaby does not believe his eyes when he see the decaying body of the leader of the gangs in London rises up from his own grave.  Faced with a Legion of the Dead, Barnaby must find a way to defeat them before they take over the city.

There is a Phantom in Blood Alley that can disappear into then air. After an experiment with photographic chemical goes disastrously wrong, it is up to Barnaby to find the mad chemist before an innocent person is tried for murder.

Reviewer: Dorothy Pittman