Doctor Who

New York, 1939. Private eye Melody Malone takes a job to track down a stolen ruby, the Eye of Horus. The gem may point to the location of Cleopatra's tomb, and everyone who has handled it has died. Melody has to decide whether the curse is real.

Melody is also the creation of River Song, who writes the Melody Malone Mysteries. River has her own reason to chase the Eye of Horus: she is made to hunt for a weapon that can alter reality. She dismisses curses as nonsense, yet the death toll gives her cause to wonder.

Her search runs from the top-security cells of Stormcage to first-century Egypt, where the world is far harsher. River must reach the Eye before anyone can use its power to transform the universe. The book is a Doctor Who adventure that mixes a hard-boiled detective tale with time travel.

To succeed, River needs an ally she would never have expected: Melody, her own fictional alter ego. Together the two women face a second puzzle. Either fiction is turning into fact, or fact is turning into fiction, and neither of them can say which.