Sacrifice

In the 1100s, a group of twelve knights on the Crusaders received an mystic lily from an angel of the Lord in North Africa. The lily conferred unique powers to each of the knights—such as psychic power and the ability to crush bones from afar. Upon returning from the Holy Land with a sacred relic, the knights created a powerful order that was eventually undermined by the Church. As a result, the sacred lily was hidden away and a council of twelve continued the order in secret.

In 1890, three descendants of the original twelve knights find themselves searching for the relic. They each have gifts from the lily; but many of the descendants also have been cursed—they have a tendency to go mad.

In London, chilly Miranda travels to her stern and unknown grandparents, because her mother has been put in an asylum. Miranda has been taken away from her mother's world of artists and suffragist activists to live with her father’s family, who are ashamed that she is illegitimate. Her only solace is her deck of tarot cards, which allow her see the patterns of the future.

In a tower outside Prague, lonely deformed Jacinth, a Parisian orphan, lives in isolation. She is visited by her jailor/caretaker Nicolas Tremayne, who bids her to use her gift of farsight—a sort of astral projection---to find other descendants of the lily. Jacinth’s journeys provide some of the most luminous descriptions in the novel:

"She rose up, hovering just above the bed for a moment or two, and then rising higher to the ceiling…She floated through the top of the tower, then drifted in the air above it. Filled with a surge of energy, she shot up, like an arrow, into the sky and through billows of rain clouds that would have chilled and wetted her, had she possessed a body….She lingered for a moment, high in the atmosphere, hundred of feet up, the face of the earth obscured by white and silver cloud."

And in the Irish countryside, young Jack meets the ancient and laudanum-addicted James Maslin in his seemingly abandoned ancestral home. He discovers Maslin's terrible curse—the ability to see into past that puts him into a deathlike trance, and his connection to the lily and Tremaynes.

Ms. Singleton weaves together these storylines in a narrative that travels across locales, time periods and even space. The pacing is as gripping as Dan Brown’s bestselling The DaVinci Code; she mines religious conspiracy tropes with historical accuracy and a fervent belief in the supernatural. Though marketed as a young adult title, it has significant crossover appeal.

Ms. Singleton is one of the premier stylists in speculative fiction. Her prose is like poetry and belongs on the same shelf as such prose-magicians as Patricia McKillip, Tanith Lee and Jack Vance.

She's a writer's writer; her attention to craft adds a richness to the twisty plot that is missing from most thrillers. Her characterizations are poignant; even the villains have a human aspect. For now, Singleton's work is only available in the UK, but two US editions of her previous novels are coming out in the near future. Here’s hoping that they garner enough praise to have this fine novel get a wider readership.