Scarlet

Scarlet Benoit's grandmother, Michelle Benoit, has vanished, and the police have closed the case. Scarlet is left to run the family farm outside Rieux, in southern France, and she is sure her grandmother did not simply leave. She is equally sure no one will help her prove it.

Wolf, a quiet street fighter at the local tavern, appears to know something. He moves in a way that does not seem quite human. He offers to guide her to Paris, the city where her grandmother's abductors were last seen. Scarlet has no good reason to trust him, and no one else to turn to.

A second storyline runs far from the farm. Linh Cinder, a cyborg mechanic, escapes from prison in New Beijing in a stolen ship, with Carswell Thorne, an escaped military cadet, beside her. A Lunar queen is hunting them. She wants the Eastern Commonwealth and its young emperor, and she will take them by marriage if she can and by war if she cannot.

This is the second Lunar Chronicle, a science fiction retelling of Little Red Riding Hood that continues the story begun in Cinder. The red hood, the farmhouse and the wolf on the road all appear, and each carries a meaning the fairy tale never gave it. The book alternates between two threads and follows a missing-person search that grows into something larger.