Twelve months ago, Oscar Ockham reopened his magic shop to a room full of champagne, purple doves and people who loved him. Today he is alone in it, measuring dust.
Glitter Buckets is dying. Not dramatically – just steadily, killed off by a magic-and-clowning superstore called Maccies that sells everything Oscar sells, cheaper, with free delivery and a filter for sorting price low to high.
Then Maccies announces a physical branch. Across the water. On the site of his ex-fiancée’s gallery, inside a shopping centre that is steadily eating the coastline.
A website was a ghost you couldn’t haunt back. A shop has a roof, foundations, and a front door that practically demands a one-man picket.
So Oscar fights back – small, spiteful, magnificently petty; one man, no capital, and a great many friends he has reasons not to confide in. The harder he pushes, the less this looks like competition and the more it looks like a plan. Somebody chose this town. Somebody chose him. And whoever is behind it knows things about Oscar Ockham that no shopkeeper’s rival should know.
The trail runs from a drizzling Devon seafront to a faded casino on the Las Vegas Strip, and the enemy waiting at the end of it is a great deal closer to home than a shopping centre.
With a Glitterbit of Luck is the third book in the trilogy. New readers can freely start here – the shop is open, the town is on fire (not literally), and the back-history arrives in small comic doses.
Dry, warm, extremely silly, and entirely British. For readers of comic science fiction who like their apocalypses local and their heroes underinsured.