1st title in the Chronoptika Quartet. Jake’s father disappears while working on mysterious experiments with the obsessive, reclusive Oberon Venn. Jake is convinced Venn has murdered him. But the truth he finds at the snow-bound Wintercombe Abbey is far stranger …
The experiments concerned a black mirror, which is a portal to both the past and the future. Venn is not alone in wanting to use its powers. Strangers begin gathering in and around Venn’s estate: Sarah – a runaway, who appears out of nowhere and is clearly not what she says, Maskelyne – who claims the mirror was stolen from him in some past century. There are others, a product of the mirror’s power to twist time. And a tribe of elemental beings surround this isolated estate, fey, cold, untrustworthy, and filled with hate for humans. But of them all, Jake is hell-bent on using the mirror to get to the truth. Whatever the cost, he must learn what really happened to his father.
“THE OBSIDIAN MIRROR has one of the most memorable fictional openings I’ve read for a while … the book takes off into a slick, accomplished fantasy with a time-travel motif, centring on the black mirror and a plot to avenge Jake’s father’s death.” The Daily Telegraph
“Fisher’s universe is wholly envisaged, from the haughty, frightening Shee to the girl who’s come from the future on a devastating mission. Fisher manages her extensive cast and plot with precision and tension. This is bleak, brittle and brilliant.” The Literary Review
“A schoolboy hell-bent on avenging his father’s death, a time-travelling revolutionary, a changeling ensorcelled in a frozen fairyland, … five separate story-lines collide during a solstice blizzard at a remote Gothic ruin … No author is better than Fisher at weaving disparate narratives, characters, even genres into an enthralling tapestry, nor at highlighting exactly the right detail to invest the whole with chilling significance.” Kirkus reviews
