Box 991

<p>Semi‑Dual-urbane unnervingly calm and armed with strange arts as surely as any detective carries a notebook-returns to put occult craft at the service of justice. He is part metaphysician part magistrate of the moral order: a man who reads thought‑waves as others read footprints charts the pressure of fate by the stars and arranges ordinary facts so they point toward the extraordinary truth.</p><p>In Snared a plucky woman and a hard‑bitten detective vanish into the city's underworld. Where policemen see only danger Semi‑Dual perceives pattern: he moves unseen through Chinatown lays bait and counter‑bait and converts a desperate decoy into a rescue no one else could have conceived.</p><p>In Box 991 a missing hoard and a set of impossible signatures challenge every mundane skill in the book. Semi‑Dual thinks in circles-astrological forensic metaphysical-untangling forgery duplicity and mechanized trickery with patient uncanny logic until the hidden method and the hidden moral can both be named.</p><p>Two lean cabalistic thrillers in which detection is as much a matter of the spirit as of the senses-and one indomitable mind reads the world until it yields its secrets.</p><p></p>