Chimera: 1. a mythical creature, a fire-breathing female with face, body, and limbs of three different beasts.
2. something that exists only in the imagination and is not possible in reality.

New fantasy adventure from

Cate Glass

An Illusion of Thieves

Read an excerpt of An Illusion of Thieves
Read an excerpt of A Conjuring of Assassins
Read an excerpt of A Summoning of Demons

View a sketch map of the Costa Drago.
View a sketch map of Cantagna.

Glossary of the Chimera World
Reviews of the Chimera adventures


An Illusion of Thieves

In a land where the taint of magic is a death sentence, four sorcerers find an unexpected calling...

When Romy's brother risks using magic for petty thieving, she exerts her influence as the Shadow Lord’s beloved courtesan to save his life. The price is her dismissal from nine years of settled happiness. Forced back to her roots in Cantagna’s Beggar's Ring, Romy has only her wits and her own secret magic to make a new life for herself and her angry young brother. As they struggle to survive, they find allies in unexpected quarters -- a professional duelist with a dangerous past and a metalsmith with an knack for forgery.  

Cast as scapegoat in a plot to overthrow the Shadow Lord and drive Cantagna into civil war, Romy finds herself in a confluence of bronze antiquities, pious grand ducs, treacherous allies, and greedy art dealers. She, her brother, and their newfound partners must risk exposing their secrets to save Romy's life and preserve Cantagna’s future as a city of justice and enlightenment.

2020 Colorado Book Award, Winner

A Conjuring of Assassins

Conjuring

Romy and her partners of the Chimera have embraced their roles as the Shadow Lord’s agents, using their forbidden magic to accomplish tasks his other spies cannot. Their new mission seems simple.

- Locate a prisoner arrested for spying
- Discover where the spy has hidden a list of powerful men and women pledged to assassinate Cantagna's most dangerous enemy.
- Destroy the list before it plunges the entire Costa Drago into a firestorm of murderous vengeance.
Not so simple. The prisoner shows up in a place he shouldn't be and is not at all the kind of person the partners of the Chimera expect. The Mercediaran ambassador, who will take custody of the prisoner, has a fascination with divination, a strange obsession with perfection, a terror of malignant spirits, and a murky past. And when Placidio and Romy infiltrate the ambassador’s household by impersonating a cloth merchant and an aspiring diviner, they discover that the ambassador’s oddities and the prisoner’s identity signal dangers far more explosive than exposing the Assassins List.


A Summoning of Demons

Summoning

An earthquake leaves the city of Cantagna on edge. The Philosophic Confraternity pronounces it the work of ancient monster Dragonis, imprisoned beneath the lands of the Costa Drago. In every street and market philosophists rant of the dangers of sorcerers, whose purpose, they have always claimed, is to free the monster. Magic sniffers lurk in every alleyway.

Meanwhile Romy experiences a series of increasingly disturbing dreams, even as she struggles to make sense of the Shadow Lord’s abrupt request for the Chimera to thwart an arranged marriage. The bride, the brilliant daughter of a high-ranking city official, has written an incendiary treatise that exposes the philosophists’ teachings as nonsense. The groom, the strange, reclusive son of a high-ranking Confraternity Director, displays an unremitting loyalty to his family's beliefs.

When the partners of the Chimera spirit the two to a ruin outside the city, they are drawn into an unraveling chain of conspiracy, murder, and corruption, along with a terrifying suspicion that the philosophists' age-old warnings might be right after all.

Read an excerpt


Cover art by Alyssa Winans


Find Cate's books at brick-and-mortar booksellers, as well as through Indiebound or Amazon.com, or other online booksellers.

All novels are available in trade paperback, Kindle electronic editions, various other electronic and/or audio editions.

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