Award-winning storyteller Philip Pullman’s gripping historical adventure stories for younger readers about the New Cut Gang are attractively published in this handsome hardback. Set in the streets of London in 1894 the two stories, 'Thunderbolt’s Waxwork' and 'The Glass-Fitter’s Ball', tell how the gang - Benny, Thunderbolt, Bridie and the Peretti twins – helped just a little by the famous detective Sexton Blake - get to the bottom of who is producing the counterfeit sixpences and tackle the silver that goes missing from the Worshipful Company of Gas Fitters.
Benny, Thunderbolt, Bridie, Sharky and the Peretti twins are a mixed bunch of vagabonds and urchins who come together to form the New Cut Gang in two comic tales of stolen silver and skulduggery. Fake coins are turning up all over Lambeth and the finger of suspicion is pointing at Thunderbolt's dad - could he really be the forger? The crime-busting New Cut Gang come to the rescue! And when just two clues - a blob of wax and a Swedish match - are discovered at the scene of a break-in, the children find themselves on the trail of an extremely cunning criminal. Set in late Victorian London, these gripping thrillers have now been put together in a single volume - with new illustrations throughout from Horrible Histories illustrator, Martin Brown.
Philip Pullman one of the most acclaimed writers working today.
He is best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which has been named one of the top 100 novels of all time by Newsweek. He has also won many distinguished prizes, including the Carnegie Medal for Northern Lights (and the reader-voted ‘Carnegie of Carnegies’ for the best children’s book of the past seventy years); the Whitbread (now Costa) Award for The Amber Spyglass; and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in honour of his body of work. The first volume of Philip Pullman’s long-awaited trilogy The Book of Dust, set in the same world as His Dark Materials, published in 2017, and the second volume followed in 2019.