Meet Skulduggery Pleasant: detective, sorcerer, warrior. Oh yes. And dead. The Necromancers no longer need Valkyrie to be their Death Bringer, and that's a Good Thing. There's just one catch. There's a reason the Necromancers don't need her any more - because they've found their Death Bringer already, the person who will dissolve the doors between life and death. And that's a very, very Bad Thing...

Derek Landy lives near Dublin. Before writing his children's story about a sharply-dressed skeleton detective, he wrote the screenplays for a zombie movie and a murderous horror film. ""I think my career-guidance teacher is spinning in her grave,"" he says, ""or she would be if she were dead.""