Longlisted for the 2020 Mslexia Children’s & YA Novel Competition
“A. E. Daly’s dark and richly imagined thriller infuses a contemporary murder mystery with fantasy elements of time-travel and alchemy, and spikes the whole with fascinating detail of such diverse topics as cathedral architecture, photography and parkour. She explores themes of grief, obsession and family betrayal in vivid language and visceral imagery that’s as impossible to resist as her smart, quirky teenage protagonists.”
– Kathryn Ross, Fraser Ross Associates
Devil-Glass is a contemporary time-travel mystery set in a small Northern town.
Age Group: Teen
He wondered sometimes why he loved it so – this keepsake of a man he couldn’t remember. His father was a vacuum, a hole he’d tried not to fill with fantasies or blame for everything that had gone wrong since. Over the years his dreams and wants had shrunk to a single, simple regret: that he couldn’t remember them together, couldn’t see himself with his father and Neeve; he’d been too young. Just one glimpse, one memory that would stick, one real moment he could tear loose from the soft, faded photos Neeve kept stubbornly reframing.
But he couldn’t have it, so he wore the Opal.
The stone was set in a thick brass band which gave it a mechanical look, the edges milled into harsh geometric patterns that had rubbed soft with age. Slowly, Mark lined them up with the marks in his hand; how hard had he been gripping it, to force those dull points through his skin?
Mark Scarfe cares for his mother Neeve, a once-famous photographer who struggles with depression and runs an ailing camera shop; his father Martin is dead, his only memento a strange necklace nicknamed the Opal. Outside their house looms the town’s vast medieval cathedral, its stoneyard managed by Mark’s family for generations. One night a suspicious fire burns the cathedral attic to ruins, and a bag belonging to Mark’s beloved aunt Harriet, the cathedral librarian, is found in the wreckage; worse, there are bloodstains on it and Harry herself is missing. When Mark finds a weird antique ‘camera’ hidden in Harry’s office he is determined to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
Pursuing the secrets of the macabre machine deep into Mark’s family history, Mark and his friends Jay and Dev discover the artefact’s time travel powers and its relationship to the Opal, and wrestle both the temptations and the dangers of time travel as they race to change the fate of Harriet Scarfe.
A. E. Daly 