Skulduggery Pleasant
Derek Landy

When Stephanie meets Mr Skulduggery Pleasant, she knows there is something strange about him but it isn’t until their third meeting, when he’s saving her life, that she discovers he’s actually a 450-year-old skeleton detective!

Bored of her mundane life, she welcomes the excitement of Skulduggery’s magic-filled adventures and persuades him to let her join him on his quest to stop Nafarian Serpine – one of the many bad guys they encounter on their fight to save the world.

This book is non-stop action: a striking cast of spooky characters, supernatural magic and spine-tingling thrills with smart, snappy dialogue.

Derek Landy
Skulduggery Pleasant

Before writing his children’s story about a sharply-dressed skeleton detective, Derek Landy wrote the screenplays for a zombie movie and a murderous thriller in which everybody dies.

As a black belt in Kenpo Karate he has taught countless children how to defend themselves, in the hopes of building his own private munchkin army. He firmly believes that they await his call to strike against his enemies (he doesn’t actually have any enemies, but he’s assuming they’ll show up, sooner or later).

Derek lives on the outskirts of Dublin, and the reason he writes his own biography blurb is so that he can finally refer to himself in the third person without looking pompous or insane.

(Page 48)

"Stephanie stared at the door, trying to make sense of the impossible.

"Well," Skulduggery said, "that's something you don't see every day."

She turned. When his hat came off, his hair had come off too. In the confusion all she had seen was a chalk-white scalp, so she turned expecting to see a bald albino maybe. But no. With his sunglasses gone and his scarf hanging down, there was no denying the fact that he had no flesh, he had no skin, he had no eyes and he had no face.

All he had was a skull for a head."

Extract taken from Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy published by HarperCollins