Product details
- ISBN 9780008842376
- Weight: 270g
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 29 Oct 2026
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Legends & Lattes meets The Lost Apothecary in this debut adventure fantasy following a potion maker who must hide her powers under the cover of a crew of conmen, only to lean on each other for comfort, safety, and even love
When Ellastaria Strange joins a ragtag crew of con artists and serpent-oil salesmen, she’s just trying to escape the slow death of poverty, not sell fake cure-alls in dinky rural villages. Yet Ella harbors a dangerous secret. Unlike her crooked co-workers, she's the real thing; an apothecary with supernatural abilities, hiding from a world fearful of such powers, covertly helping people when she can.
Ella’s life of deceit takes a terrifying turn when her team swindles the wrong town and Ella accidentally reveals her true nature to fanatics with no tolerance for the supernatural. On the run from obsessed vigilantes, Ella and her crew find refuge with a beer brewer who wants nothing to do with crooks or occultists, and his starry-eyed sister who wants in on all of it.
For any hope of a future, the scrappy misfits must band together, embrace what makes them outcasts, and trust in each other’s talents – no matter how strange.
Rustin Lovewell is trained in microbiology and immunology, and is the author of over a dozen biomedical research manuscripts. A life-long reader of epic fantasy, Rustin’s speculative fiction has appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores and the Volume 35 Writers of the Future anthology. He is a winner of the 2019 Writers of the Future contest and is a regular attendee of Balticon and the Superstars Writing Seminars. Rustin resides near Washington D.C. with his wife, two young daughters, and mini-dachshund affectionately known as Lady Little Legs.
