When Emily Darkwood inherited her mother's brooch she found herself plunged into a life-time of danger and mystery. The amber gem is a guide stone; one of many talismans from a forgotten age of arcane provenance that have individual and unique abilities and powers. Darkwood's stone draws the bearer and the forces of darkness together.
With this lodestone of darkness, and the able support of her young servant companion Jack Hobbs, she is ennobled as a crusader against evil and villainy—supernatural and criminal—as a seeker of the truth behind her parents' mysterious disappearances and presumed deaths.
However, holding the stone can also be a curse, for others seek its powers or to remain hidden from them; the criminal, the unnatural, and the otherworldly. In her quest to cast light against the darkness of the land she risks losing herself and all that she holds dear—her aunt and uncle who raised her, the medical career she so desperately desires, her friends and her chances of love and a family of her own.
