The charmingly eccentric Otto Draxinger appears to be your typical pipe-smoking Oxford professor, doing his best to preserve his sanity while his beloved former students are being slaughtered at the Western Front. But the American expatriate has diagnosed himself with the newly coined term “schizophrenia.” And he believes the nightmarish waking visions he’s been experiencing are caused by the psychological trauma of the catastrophe that is The Great War.
But after a chance encounter on a train with a beautiful and dangerous woman, the witty academic is drawn into a web of espionage and the paranormal. Conscripted by a secret British intelligence agency called The Department of Anti-Mageia, the astonished Draxinger is transported to an isolated castle and immediately put into training for a desperate mission.
Here, at the mysterious brigade’s headquarters called The Crypt, Draxinger makes friends with his fellow recruits including the fighter pilot ace Buppy Singh, the wily weapons inventor code named “Fizz,” and the brilliant cryptologist/suffragette known only as Abacus.
But Draxinger soon learns that to uncover the appalling truth about his terrifying visions, he will have to come face to face with the German side of his family’s legacy of the Dark Arts. For he has been ordered to fly straight into the heart of enemy territory, and assassinate his murderous brother—an operative for the German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm’s own agency of the occult.
From Oxford to Berlin to the skies above No Man’s Land, the reluctant yet always humorous professor-turned-spy must discover how to wield magic for good … in a world gone truly bad.
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“An addictive read…With its mythic qualities and mesmerizing voice, this novel will appeal to fans of Tolkien, Gaiman, and Rothfuss. But there is also a solid grounding in the realities of the Great War and the political situation leading up to it that should appeal to history buffs, too.”
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Historical Novel Society