On the Nature of Magic

By Marian Womack

2023

First Published

2.74

Average Rating

336

Number of Pages

10H15M

Audio Length

Part of Series

Helena Walton-Cisneros

Series · 2 books

By Marian Womack

A Gothic supernatural mystery for fans for The Quickening and The Shape of Darkness, featuring real-life events and people, such as George Méliès and the Moberly-Jourdain incident, where two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. 1902. Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for finding answers to the impossible, has started her own detective agency. She takes on two new uncanny cases, both located in Paris – which itself is too much of a coincidence to ignore. In the first case, two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. The second case is the murder of a young woman working at the mysterious Méliès Star Films studio outside Paris. As Helena and her colleague Eliza investigate, they hear whispers of vanishings at Méliès Star Films, strange lights, spies, actors flying without ropes and connections to the occult. What is George Méliès practising at his secretive film studio? And is it connected to the haunting in Versailles? Helena and Eliza will only find the answers if they accept the natural world is darker, stranger than they could ever have imagined…

Avg Rating

2.74

Number of Ratings

189

5 STARS

4 STARS

21%

3 STARS

33%

2 STARS

32%

1 STARS

11%

goodreads

Author

Marian Womack

Author · 6 books

Marian Womack is a bilingual writer born in Andalusia and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. She is currently completing a part-time Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, and recently graduated from the Clarion Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writer’s Workshop at USCD. She is co-editor of the academic book Beyond the Back Room: New Perspectives on Carmen Martín Gaite (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), and of The Best of Spanish Steampunk (forthcoming, 2015). In Spanish she has published the cycle of intertwined tales Memoria de la Nieve (Zaragoza: Tropo, 2011), has co-authored the YA novel Calle Andersen (Barcelona: La Galera, 2014), and has contributed to more than fifteen anthologies of short fiction, the most recent Alucinadas (Gijón: Palabaristas, 2014), the first Spanish language all-female SF anthology. Her journalism and critical writing on Spanish literature, culture and society have appeared on a variety of English speaking academic journals, as well as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Internationalist, and the digital version of El País. She has fiction forthcoming in English in Weird Fiction Review. Chosen by literary magazine Leer in its 30th anniversary as one of the thirty most influential people in their thirties in Spain’s literary scene, she is also a prolific translator, and runs a small press in Madrid, Ediciones Nevsky.