Skulduggery Pleasant
The skeleton detective is coming back to life… again! It’s the tenth, triumphant novel in the Skulduggery Pleasant series, and it will rearrange your world.Skulduggery and Valkyrie are back in the tenth instalment in the bestselling Skulduggery Pleasant series – an incredible and unexpected treat for the legions of fans around the world.We can’t say much but we can say this: Skulduggery and Valkyrie are going to team up with beloved characters from the first 9 books as well as an all-new cast, including new teen co-star Omen Darkly, for an adventure that takes the story to truly global proportions… while answering questions that go right back to the beginning.And Derek says this: “I was halfway through Last Stand of Dead Men, I think, when I realised that I had more stories to tell. I told myself that if Skulduggery and Valkyrie survived the series, I would leave the option open of returning to their world. There were still secrets I need to reveal, after all, and there were still horrors they had to face. They survived the first series. But they’re really going to wish they hadn’t.”
Читать Skulduggery Pleasant онлайн беплатно
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
First published in this edition in the United States of America by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
Skulduggery Pleasant rests his weary bones on the web at:
Derek Landy blogs under duress at
Text copyright © Derek Landy 2017
Skulduggery Pleasant>TM Derek Landy
Skulduggery Pleasant logo>TM HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Skulduggery Pleasant © >TM Derek Landy
Cover design © blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration © Neil Swabb
Derek Landy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008266462
Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008266479
Version: 2019-05-02
This book is dedicated to Yve.
Yve, our friendship is like a fine wine: it improves with age, is fragrant and ebullient, and it has aromas of mulberries and pencil lead and …
No. No, that’s not it.
Our friendship is less like wine and more like a journey. It has twists and turns and sometimes you lose the signal for the radio and find yourself driving around in circles thanks to the cheap sat nav you bought from that guy with the …
No, that’s not it either.
Our friendship is less like wine, and less like a journey, and more like a … a …
Listen, Yve, they’re going to print in the morning and I have to get this dedication done in the next few minutes but I really can’t think of anything that adequately describes our friendship so it’d be much easier if we just weren’t friends any more.
Really sorry.
In the nothing before the beginningthere was a thought. And the thoughtbecame the beginning.
Contents
A new beginning.
That’s what this was. A fresh start. He was going to deliver this one piece of information and then leave. He could go home, back to New York, or maybe Chicago, or Philly. Ireland didn’t suit him any more. He was done with it – and it, apparently, was done with him. He was OK with that. He’d had some good times here. He’d had some fun. He’d made some friends. But a new day was about to dawn. All Temper Fray had to do was survive the night.
The wall up ahead cracked. By the light of the streetlamps, the cracks spider-webbed. Any last vestige of hope that he’d just be able to walk out of here vanished with those cracks. Temper had seen this trick before. A redneck psycho called Billy-Ray Sanguine used to jump out at people as they passed, kill them before they blinked. Temper had met Sanguine once. For a hillbilly hitman, he’d been all right. Whoever this guy was, he was no Billy-Ray.
The wall spat out a skinny little runt who came at him with a big knife and a bigger snarl. Temper ignored the snarl for the moment, focused on the knife, batting it away and slamming an elbow into the runt’s mouth, dealing with the snarl almost by default. The runt went down, all flailing limbs and broken teeth, and Temper hurried on.
Yep. Things were going badly. But of course they were. Nothing ever went well for Temper Fray.
A motorbike came round the corner ahead of him, its single headlight sweeping the storefronts, and slowed almost immediately. Temper kept walking, keeping his head down, his hands swinging loosely by his sides. The guy on the motorbike wasn’t wearing a helmet, and he wasn’t looking at Temper. He was focused on the road, keeping his head straight. Just a guy on his bike, that’s all, going about his business. As he drew parallel, his right hand drifted into his jacket.
