Publisher's Synopsis
The plague is spreading across Europe - a plague as vile and vicious as the plagues of the middle ages. It is a plague more virulent than any childhood disease: everyone will catch it; everyone who catches it will die. But this is no ordinary plague: it is the work of a sorcerer - a man of exactly the stripe as Boothby's infamous villain, Nikola. One man knows how it's spread. One man can stop it - if he can face Pharos, The Egyptian. If he dares, for the life of the world. Boothby was a prolific Australian novelist and writer, noted for sensational fiction in variety magazines around the end of the nineteenth century. He lived mainly in England and is best known for such works as the Dr Nikola series; about an occultist criminal mastermind who is a Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu, and Pharos, the Egyptian. Rudyard Kipling was his friend and mentor and his books were remembered with affection by George Orwell.
