The secret of the alchemist - John Ward

For ages 12 to adult. The Secret of the Alchemist is currently being considered for the Scottish Arts Council's Children's Book of the Year; the French edition has already been rated as one of Amazon's Books of the Year 2003. In this richly-textured tale, the first part of the 'Fate of the Stone' trilogy, teenagers Jake and Helen meet at a Dante festival in Florence and are drawn into the murky underworld intrigues of Helen's estranged father, a dodgy art-dealer, when his unwise attempt to double-cross the occultist Aurelian Pounce miscarries.;What starts as a light-hearted adventure soon takes a sinister turn as Jake and Helen find themselves pursued by Pounce and his demonic crew through a strangely empty, fog-bound Venice that seems to have slipped out of time. Though thwarted by the intervention of Dante Alighieri himself, Pounce hounds the children across Europe, from Milan to London and the South of France, as they race against time to save Helen's father and discover the age-old secret of the alchemist. In a truly terrifying climax, the gates of hell themselves are opened, and the long-dead alchemist summoned to appear. The author, after a highly successful tour of Canada and the USA, will be visiting schools and bookshops all over Scotland this Spring (2004).