The Phoenix and the Firebird – Published August 27 2024

Happy also to blurb this tale – The Phoenix and the Firebird (Earnshaw Books) – that mashes up fantasy (not normally my genre at all) with old China – A bullet-riddled train staggers into a Chinese station in 1920, and Lucy discovers that her father, a Russian officer, has been kidnapped. A mysterious feather guides her into a dangerous realm of magic and monsters to rescue him. But she knows she can’t take on the quest alone. With her friend Su, a girl as quick with words as with her fists, the two uncover the terrifying truth: a notorious warlord has seized Lucy’s father. Worse, he is about to invade their city. The friends brave the criminal underworld, cross a haunted forest, and outsmart creatures they thought lived only in fairytales. But will their wits and bravery be enough to beat the warlord’s army of human soldiers and magical beasts?

“A Peking caught between an imperial city and a new republic; a world where harsh reality mingles with myth and magic. Warlords, exiled Russians, gangsters, a child in search of her father. There are worlds within worlds in old Peking – real and imagined. Kossiakoff and Crawford bring them all together and to life.” – Paul French, New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Peking and City of Devils