It is now two years since Lyra parted from Will in The Amber Spyglass, the final book of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. She is 14 or 15 and a student at St. Sophia's school in Oxford (the Oxford on her alternate Earth). One day Lyra and Pantalaimon, her daemon, who has settled permanently into the form of a pine marten, are on the roof of Lodge Tower when they see a huge flock of starlings attacking a bird-like creature that turns out to be a witch's daemon. They rescue the creature and it tells them its witch is sick and it has been sent to find an alchemist in Oxford, Sebastian Makepeace, who has an elixir that will cure the witch. So Lyra and Pantalaimon go to look for Makepeace, but when they get to his address and look in, there's a witch there, and a man lying on the floor -- possibly dead. This 2003 book is a very short tale (less than 50 pages) supplemented by a map of Oxford, a reproduction of a postcard from someone named Angela Gorman, and a schedule for the cruise ship S.S. Zenobia (mysterious "evidence" that reminds one of the books of Nick Bantock), which suggests we have not heard the last of Lyra's adventures.
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The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus