Mairelon the Magician

This delightful romp is set in an alternate Regency England, where a royal college of wizards flourishes and the government includes a minister of wizardry. Kim, a girl raised to thievery on the London streets and now disguised as a boy, teams up with Mairelon the Magician after she is hired to search his caravan. Mairelon turns out not to be the simple marketplace phony Kim first thinks him, but Richard Merrill, a member of the gentry and a true magician. He is looking for a group of silver implements, necessary for a truth spell, that he had been accused of stealing from the royal college of wizards years before. He has found one piece and is given a lead to another, supposedly secreted at a country estate. Kim and Merrill, along with his grumbling servant Hunch, travel down to Essex, encountering the inept Sons of the New Dawn, breaking into a house party where others beat them to their prize, discovering a variety of forgeries and getting mixed up in a murder and the elopement of an heiress. Kim finds she has a true talent for wizardry and escapes the fate awaiting a young girl in the streets of this alternate early-19th-century London. Wrede's ( Snow White and Rose Red ) confection will charm readers of both Regency romances and fantasies. (June)