In Stoneheart, a London schoolboy named George Chapman accidentally damaged a carved stone dragon. This rash act plunged him into a hidden world, an "unLondon," in which statues and gargoyles move about and have feelings, and where the humanlike "spits" are at war with the monstrous "taints." George had an opportunity to pay his debt to the city's heart of stone, but instead he chose to go "the hard way." In this book, he begins to find out just how hard that way is going to be.

George is immediately separated from his two best friends in this unLondon of living stone and metal. The Gunner (a bronze statue of a World War I soldier) has been taken captive by a fiendish, lost soul known as the Walker. And now a gargoyle swoops down and carries George away, leaving his other friend Edie vulnerable and alone.

Edie is known as a "glint" because of the way she experiences the painful memories locked in metal and stone. The only thing she has to hang onto is a piece of sea-glass that glows in the presence of evil, such as the Walker and any taints. The Gunner, trapped in a cistern lost beneath the city, knows that the Walker is hunting glints like Edie, destroying them and colecting their heart-stones for his own wicked purposes. The trouble is: How can he warn her before a two-faced statue lures Edie into the Walker's trap? And what can Edie do once the Walker reveals the full horridness of his plan?

And where does all this leave George? It leaves him running, flying, plunging, and scrabbling from one deadly battle to another in a nonstop, adrenaline-fueled flow of furious action like nothing seen in children's literature since, well, Stoneheart. He learns how he must fight three duels to the death, and how the veins of stone and metal spreading up his arm will kill him if he runs from a fight. He makes surprising discoveries about who his friends and enemies are. And he faces his own personal hell in his desperate bid to save the Gunner, who will die if his plinth is empty at turn-o'-day (midnight).

The only thing this book lacks is a resolution of all the trials and adventures in store for George and his friends. But that's all right. It's only the second book in a trilogy, which concludes with Silvertongue, coming out in hardcover in April 2009.

Robbie Fischer
USA

Recommended Age: 12+

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