Once the Oversight, the secret society that polices the lines between the mundane and the magic, counted hundreds of brave souls among its members. Now their number can be tallied on a single hand.
When a drunkard brings a screaming girl to the Oversight's London headquarters, it seems their hopes for a new recruit will be fulfilled—but the girl is a trap, her appearance a puzzle the five remaining guardians must solve or lose each other, and their society, for good.
As the borders between the natural and the supernatural begin to break down, brutal murders erupt across the city, the Oversight are torn viciously apart, and their enemies close in for the final blow.
This dark Dickensian fantasy spins a tale of witch-hunters, magicians, mirror-walkers and the unlikeliest of heroes drawn from the depths of British folklore. Meet the Oversight, and remember: when they fall, so do we all.
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Charlie Fletcher, author of the Stoneheart trilogy for children, gives Suzanna Clarke a run for her money in The Oversight, a canny urban fantasy about a secret society sworn to protect the people from supranatural shenanigans.
"We were founded long ago," Sara said, "when the world was less crowded and people liked to fill up the space with four or five long words where one simple one would do: we are the Free Company for the Regulation and Oversight of Recondite Exigency and Supranatural Lore." (p.42)
That's magic to you and me—which is to say "strange, hidden things that happen without a normal explanation" (p.42)—and the very reasonable rules governing its usage; rules the Oversight exists to enforce... or has done, historically. These days, though, they can hardly keep their own house in order, so what hope do they have of overcoming a conspiracy of wicked witchfinders?
Once upon a time, there were many Hands in many lands, with five fingers each and an abundance of extra digits insisting on enlisting—the better to defend against those who would use their supranatural skills for ill. Then the Disaster happened; the Oversight was betrayed by its own, and you might measure the cost of its lax attitude in lives, given that the Great Fire of London was the result.
Fast forward to the year eighteen something or other. The society has been dramatically diminished in the centuries since the Disaster. No one trusts the Oversight any more, thus there's just the one Hand left standing, led—insofar as any Hand can be—by Sara Falk, a Glint who sees herself reflected in the serving girl who, at the outset of Fletcher's text, is deposited on the doorstep of the house the last Hand shares on Wellclose Square.