Bogles Outmanned! The Last Bogler by Catherine Jinks

All at once Alfred’s voice hailed them, echoing up from the chamber beneath their feet. “Are you there, Mr. Wardle?”

“I am, Mr. Bunce.”

“Could you send them lads down? And I’ll have me sack along with ’em.”

“Yes, of course.” As Ned picked up Alfred’s sack, Mr. Wardle cleared his throat and added, “I take it you’ve found something of interest?”

“Oh, aye. This here is a bogle’s lair, make no mistake.” Alfred appeared suddenly at the foot of the stairs, his lantern raised, his long face grim. “What I don’t know is how many of ’em might be a-lurking down here. For I ain’t never seen no den more suited to a bogle’s taste, nor better laid out for the trapping o’ children. If you ask me, Mr. Wardle, there’s more’n three kids has met their doom in this rat’s nest.”

And he motioned to Ned, who reluctantly clumped downstairs with Alfred’s sack on his shoulder.

With two of Alfred Bunce's former apprentices now gone to join the bright lights of London's theatrical life, Ned is left as the "Go-Devil Man's" last bogle-bait. What he lacks in the lark-like singing voice of Birdie and the quick, acrobatic feet of Jem, the stolid Ned makes up for in his rock-solid courage and loyalty to the bogler who has saved him from the murderous hands of Sarah Pickles, who fed the babies of working mothers to bogles, and Salty-Jack, who is the underlord of the area around Newgate Prison and who has vowed to see them both dead.

But Bunce's solitary bogling trade is becoming a public utility, thanks to the plague of bogles drawn by Sarah Pickles to the central sewers around Newgate. With the knowledgeable folklorist Miss Edith Eames and city engineer Mr. Harewood, Alfred and his apprentices join officials of the Water Works in a secret association, the Committee for the Regulation of Subterranean Anomalies. Made believers in what was formerly held as ignorant superstition, the powers that be are now aware of what lurks in the underground passages of London's water, steam, and sewer system, the slithering shape-changing bogles with an insatiable taste for the flesh of young children. More and more, they seek a final solution, some form of mass extermination for the bogle plague that continues to seize children from privy, cellar drain, and chimney alike all over London.

Little-spoken but stalwart Alfred Bunce, with his circles of salt and his poisoned blackthorn spear, realizes that the success of the Committee would put an end to his livelihood, but he joins with them in their search for a way to a permanent solution to the grisly deaths of so many children. Out of loyalty to Mr. Bunce, Ned, who has little taste for the dangerous and disgusting work of bogle-killing, invariably ending with an explosion of black ectoplasmic goo, follows him into underground London, more fascinated by the steamworks and the gearing of great machines of the engineers below ground than his hair-raising job as bogler's boy. The Committee plans the great invasion of the bogles' underground lair using steam flushing and flash powder to drive them out of their weirs to be killed by a phalanx of bogle-spearing engineers, But Salty-Jack appears for one last deadly showdown with Ned and Alfred, this time high above ground in the heights of Christopher Wren's tower monument to the Great Fire of London.

In an appropriately rip-roaring conclusion to the third book in her trilogy, How to Catch A Bogle series,  forthcoming today The Last Bogler (How to Catch a Bogle) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), author Catherine Jinks brings it all together, her intricately drawn Dickensian characters, the deliciously delineated London setting on the cusp of transition from superstition to modernity so well portrayed in the metaphor of a changing underground London, and her rich, many-faceted storytelling that can't be beat. Rare enough is an author who can so realistically create a historical setting such as the mean streets of the Victorian city (see her glossary of underclass slang appended) and its proper-mannered society and yet blend it all with a fantastical thread of that society's dark and dangerous underbelly, the sewers and dark passages of underground London. Catherine Jinks does it all with writing that accrues suspense carefully and deliberately toward thrills and chills that keep the most reluctant reader enthralled.

And just as Dickens would have done, Jinks builds to a rousing happy ending, with young apprentices Birdie, Jem, and now Ned on their way to well-foreshadowed and prosperous futures in a bogle-free London and a well-earned retirement for the good bogler Alfred Bunce, an ending that leaves the reader both satisfied and yet sad to turn the last page on this masterfully entertaining series.

Read my earlier reviews of the first two books here.

Boggled!: A Plague of Bogles by Catherine Jinks

"Shhh," Alfred hissed when he spotted the grate. "That's the one." He pulled Jem back from the door. "She'll have met her end in there, poor lass." Alfred rummaged through his brown bag. "Bogles like drains," he said, quietly. "Never think any hole is too small for a bogle." He had a small leather bag in one hand and his spear in the other. "Can you sing?"

"I can sing," Jem confessed, "but not like Birdie."

"Step into the ring of salt only when I tell you. Don't move till I move. And whatever you do, lad--do not touch the salt on your way out o' the ring."

Jem began to sing. "Brandy or rum I tipple in, with my darlin'..."

What was that smell? The bogle seemed to pour through the doorway like a wave of black treacle. Then, as it gathered itself into a kind of crest--rearing up behind Jem--a huge, gaping hole appeared in its body. The bogle was starting to encircle him. Glancing down at the slimy noose that was about to tighten around his ankles, he took his eyes off Alfred for a moment.

"JEM! NOW!" screamed the bogler.

It ain't over till it's over. With Birdie taken in by the wealthy folklorist, Miss Eames, studying for a career in the opera, and Jem working for a respectable grocer, Alfred Bunce is fresh out of apprentices and figures it's high time to retire from bogle-slaying. But when Jem hears about the disappearance of scullery girl Flossie in a pub built over a dungeon of Newgate Prison, he locates Alfred and begs him to hunt down the bogle beneath the bar.

As they soon learn, it seems that many bogles have plagued the area around Newgate. It's a plague of bogles, and Alfred and Jem reason that there must be a reason for the relatively rare child-eating monsters to congregate in one area. No child is safe in the neighborhood, and reluctantly, Alfred has to enlist the help of Miss Eames and Birdie to help him clear the area of bogles. Birdie is more than a bit bored with her middle-class life, and Miss Eames can't resist pursuing her research, so the four of them begin their bogle eradication mission.

But even their skills seem to be up against more than they can handle. There must be something drawing ever more bogles to Newgate, and Jem suspects his old employer, Sarah Pickles, for whom he thieved for seven years, is involved. He does some sleuthing on his own and learns a horrible truth. Sarah is in cahoots with the ruthless butcher John Gammon, a.k.a Salty Jack, who runs a powerful protection racket in Newgate Square. Sarah is now a "baby farmer," one who takes in the babies of poor working girls for pay, with a generous cut for Salty Jack, but who spares herself the trouble of caring for them by heartlessly feeding them to bogles in the cellars, where they disappear without a trace. With a abundant diet of tender babies at hand, the plague of bogles is explained, but even the streetwise Jem is staggered by the evil of Pickles and Salty Jack. He sets out to spy on Sarah Pickles to gather proof for the police, but falls into her trap and winds up chained in her cellar, perfect bogle bait himself.

Catherine Jinks' second book in this series, A Plague of Bogles (How to Catch a Bogle) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), almost outdoes her initial tale with non-stop suspense, wry humor, and a well-fleshed out glimpse of Victorian London populated by vivid, unforgettable characters that could have come straight out of Dickens. Jinks is a master storyteller and a verbal artist who sketches out her setting and characters with infinitely fine strokes deeply steeped in British folklore, all the while keeping the tension building toward a slam-dunk climax.

With a a deliciously Dickensian slang glossary that dutiful eighth graders plowing through required reading of Great Expectations would love and a teasing touch of Jinks' next sequel appended, this second book in the trilogy has it all--deadly danger in deep, dark sewers and the dungeons of Newgate Prison, resilient orphans determined to survive, and a cast of colorful adult characters, from the Fagan-esque Sarah Pickles to a murderous butcher with all the cold-blooded guile of a Mafioso chief. This novel is a deftly plotted Gothic mystery, a page-turning thriller that grabs the reader like a hungry bogle and doesn't release until the final word is gobbled down.

Jink's initial book is How to Catch a Bogle, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, 2013) just out in a brand-new paperback edition. (Read my review here.)

The Bogler's Girl: How to Catch A Bogle by Catherine Jinks

Alfred stood to the left of the fireplace, his salt in one hand, his staff in another. He didn't speak to Birdie, who took up her usual position inside his magic circle. Though she'd turned her back on him the little mirror she was holding gave her a clear view of everything behind her: Alfred, the fireplace, the gap in the ring of salt.

She had to take only one step--across the white ring on the floor--and she would be safe. But she could not do it yet. Not until they'd lured their quarry out of its hiding place. Not until they'd baited their trap.

Suddenly Alred gave a nod. It was her cue. The blood was thundering in her ears. When she began to sing, however, her voice was clear and calm.

Birdie is the Bogler's Girl--and proud of it. Life for an orphan in nineteenth-century London is hard. Working for pennies as a mudlark digging for valuables in the stinking muck on the shores of the Thames, rat-catching in the sewers, or being a beggar or cutpurse for some wicked master to stay out of the workhouse, all promise a hard life, and a short one, and our Birdie knows she has it good.

Bogling is honest work, and she is proud to be the one and only 'prentice to Alfred Bunce, the best in the business, and her clear, sweet voice and childlike prettiness make her perfect bogle bait. Alfred has steady work; when servant children go missing near a well or fireplace or sewer opening, people are glad to pay six shillings a bogle and expenses to have Alfred kill the child-devouring beast with his shower of salt and his lance. And when the bogle is drawn out of his lair, Birdie has the nerve and quickness to stay alive in her job.

Slowly, silently, something dim and dense surged out of the chimney and onto the hearth, in a cloud of soot that blurred its hulking silhouette. It had eyes as red as rubies and black scales like chips of slate. Birdie even caught a glimpse of arms unfolding.... Then Alfred sprang his trap.

He lunged forward. Birdie did the same.

Alfred and Birdie's fame reaches the ears of Miss Eames, a wealthy folklorist of a certain age who fancies the chance to witness the bogles recounted in her ancient texts in action. Alfred reluctantly agrees to take her along on his next job, a case in which a couple of thieving boys, under the management of the wicked Sarah Pickles, have disappeared during a heist in a doctor's house. What the boglers and Miss Eames find inside Dr. Morton's sinister house reveals that he is himself a necromancer, one who claims dominance over bogles and other dark forces, and when Birdie and Alfred are tricked into doing a bogling job inside a graveyard, they are astonished to find themselves captured, chloroformed, bound, and left inside a tomb-like chapel, under the power of the evil Dr. Morton. Can Birdie's quick mind and steady nerves save them from a fate perhaps worse than a bogle?

Catherine Jink's forthcoming How to Catch a Bogle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)  is a rammer-jammer of a page-turning tale, loaded with deliciously dark Victorian-era ambiance, and with a delightfully feisty young heroine who survives by wit and courage and a lot of street savvy. Jinks, the top-selling author of the picaresque Evil Genius books, is the magical mistress of a sort of supernatural adventure solidly rooted in a realistic setting, and the world she creates for the talented Birdie McGraw promises much fantastical adventure for her character in a planned trilogy in which Birdie may have to choose whether to become a revered bogler or a lark-voiced star of the musical stage. With a cast of colorful and sometimes shady characters that even Dickens would have envied, these are books that should become classics of their genre. I can hardly wait for the next one!

With raves and starred reviews all around from the critics, this book should not be missed by middle readers who fancy a few scares and a lot of humor. ""This is top-notch storytelling from Jinks, full of wit, a colorful cast of rogues, and delectable slang," says Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus concurs, adding "... high style, offering a period melodrama replete with colorful characters, narrow squeaks and explosions of ectoplasmic goo."  Goo, glorious goo, and a glossary of London slang, too. What more could a fantasy fan want?

Axis of Evil: Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks

At seven Cadel Piggott is already an ominously intelligent child prodigy. Apprehended for serious computer hacking, at police insistence he is dragged by his distant adoptive parents to meet with a psychologist, Thaddeus Roth, whose ancient mossy office has "a rich smell of decay."

Thaddeus, however, turns out to be an unlikely ally. Warning him "not to get caught again," he allows Cadel to use his supposed therapy sessions to continue his computer hacking and introduces him to his purported father, master criminal Phineas Darkkon, who communicates from his prison cell in America through a series of nanotech transmitters, including his toilet and his contact lenses. While Cadel, limited by a court-ordered ban against computer use, contents himself with sabotaging the Sydney train and highway systems and causing his senior high school class to fail their final exams, Darkkon and Thaddeus openly set him upon a course to shape him into the evil genius who fulfills his father's vision of world domination.

When Cadel graduates from high school at the age of thirteen, Darkkon enrolls him in the Axis Institute of World Domination, where his first-year courses include embezzlement, forgery, poisoning, infiltration, and advanced computer hacking. In this convoluted atmosphere of brilliant backstabbers, Cadel finds only one friend of a sort, a good-hearted misfit student named Gazo whose body generates such a foul stench that he must wear a protective "spacesuit" and helmet. For companionship, Cadel sets up a bogus computer dating company, Partner Post, where in the avatar of a Canadian mathematics professor Eiran Dempster, he falls for a mathematically gifted woman who calls herself "Primo."

Surrounded by "freaks and geeks" and evil minds who destroy anyone who gets in their way, Cadel's infiltrations of the communications within the Axis Institute progressively reveal that he is ensnared in a web of wickedness which is almost beyond belief.

"For twelve years he had lived in a cage. A trap. His whole life was a prison, carefully designed to stop him from even wanting to get out."

The second half of this hefty novel is concerned with Cadel's efforts to extricate himself from this tyranny of terror and evil. When even Primo's emails are discovered by Darkkon, to protect her Cadel attempts to elude his minders by escaping into what he hopes will be a new life. Jinks builds layer upon layer of conspiracy and cyberchase as this hefty thriller makes its way toward its end, which seems a respite rather than conclusion to this saga.

Evil Genius is a science fiction thriller with a twisted coming-of-age theme in which anti-hero Cadel is eventually repulsed by the utter evil he sees and the web of malevolence Darkkon envisages. Although much of the action is more cerebral than actual, the book is a genuine page turner, with disguises, secret message drops, murders, kidnappings, escapes, and chase scenes as well. For readers who are fans of the Artemis Fowl series, Evil Genius takes the genre to a new level.

A sequel, Genius Squad, which Publisher's Weekly calls "as gripping, devilish, and wonderfully dark as it predecessor," was published May 1.

The Dark Is Rising....: The Mesmerist by Ronald L. Smith

I am the vessel, you see, through which the dead loved one will speak. Actually, it is all a sham.

Since the tragic death of her father, Jessamine Grace and her mother have eked out a life of genteel poverty, conducting faux seances to unite grieving townspeople with their dead, with Jess herself faking a trance as well as the messages on the spirit board she carries into a cabinet.

But this time the message, a verse from an old nursery song, seems both inane and yet sinister.

"Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posies--
Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down."

And below, written in a spidery scrawl, one single letter...

M

With little explanation, Jessamine's mother hastily whisks her away to fog-shrouded London, to the house of a wealthy but strange man who calls himself Balthazar and who explains that an evil force led by the mythical Mephistopheles, is rising, beginning with the "rosy plague" which is killing the poor of the city, and that Jess has shown herself as a mesmerist, one endowed with powers to read minds and foresee the future.

"She is coming into her power," says Balthazar.

"What power, Mother?" I ask. I am completely flabbergasted.

Her face is ashen. "There is something I must tell you,... Your father had an ability, the same one you now seem to possess. Jess, your father and I once belonged to an order."

Jessamine's mother quickly leaves her with Balthazar, who takes her on a puzzling carriage ride through the foggy city to a secret, rather shabby house, in the London slums to meet with two other children just removed from an orphanage, Gabriel and Emily, who themselves have unusual but dubiously useful powers for the mission of fighting metaphysical evil; Gabriel sings and plays a harp, and Emily can produce light and heat at will. Also in the house is a servant girl, Darby, whom Emily whispers is a sometime werewolf.

It is all very hard to accept for Jess, whose simple life is suddenly transformed to lessons in fighting with a lash and other magical tools. But when Jess's spirit board allows her to see her own mother's murder, she swears her allegiance to the faerie Balthazar and his mission and becomes a member, like her parents, in the Order of the League of Ravens.

And her first trial comes swiftly, in a dark, deep mine, in which the three alone must fight Mephisto's alter ego Malachai Grimstead and his legions of the undead, ghouls and bitter spirits.

And then the words I have heard inside my head for so long are truly spoken aloud.

"Come to me, darkling, a child born with a black soul. Death is drawn to you.

Stand by my side, darkling, and I will show you how to walk beyond death."

Author Ronald K, Smith's forthcoming magical thriller, The Mesmerist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2017), makes good use of the drear, foggy, and maleficent Victorian scene to tell a fast-moving, yet allegorical tale, in a setting where a Manichean cosmogony of the forces of evil against good are recapitulated, with the aid of Gabriel, whom we might suspect is the angel Gabriel, and Emily the spirit of Light, help the heroine confront her own personal darkness and evil itself. Even the poor housemaid Darby is herself a symbol of the struggle between good and evil within humans, a theme which savvy veterans of the Harry Potter series will certainly recognize as familiar.

With a vastly different setting but a premise similar to his highly-reviewed Hoodoo (see review here), Smith skillfully builds upon those archetypal tropes--the brink-of-adolescence hero with dead or lost parents, the sudden interjection of hidden metaphysical powers, the magical mentor who offers counsel and training but sends the protagonist forth on his or her own mission, with the help of powerful young friends, to the ultimate trial with the minion of evil who tempts with offers the powers of the dark side--all are here as they were from this genre's deep roots in Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and Susan Cooper, whose The Dark Is Rising series provides the pivotal plot point for this suspenseful fantasy novel.

Lovers of those dark-side English fantasy classics will be drawn to The Mesmerist, which will also surely please recent fans of Catherine Jinks' How to Catch a Bogle and sequels, (also Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Robert Beatty's currently best-selling Serafina and the Black Cloak and Serafina and the Twisted Staff (Serafina Book 2). (Hyperion).