In this eerie historical fantasy set in an alternate nineteenth-century London, the haunting Necropolis Railway – a steam-powered journey transporting the dead – becomes the stage for a chilling conspiracy.
Fifteen-year-old Tom Marlowe is a railway porter with a quiet life and a heavy heart, still haunted by his father's unexplained death. But when a mysterious, transparent girl appears on a funeral train, Tom is ripped from his mundane life and thrown into a chaotic world of fractured realities. Not only is he seeing ghosts, but he's discovered a mirror-London that is rapidly bleeding into his own.
Forced into an disconcerting alliance with Ruby King – a charismatic and sharp-witted medium who knows more than she lets on – Tom must navigate a landscape of grand theatres, hidden agendas, and lethal illusions. But as the boundary between the living and the dead blurs, Tom realises that the railway's chaos isn't an accident – it is a staged secret, and he is caught at its heart.
To save both worlds from total collapse, Tom must confront the truth about his family. But in a city where reality is an illusion, he will have to risk everything he loves to stop the two worlds from colliding forever.