Author Description

Theo Warren knows academia can be cutthroat, but this is ridiculous. When he gets a call that his friend's office at the nearby college was ransacked, Theo Warren rushes over to help. Almost immediately Theo is tossed into the cutthroat world of faculty politics and has to help his friend clean up after the thief. Worse, the notes the thief went after were about the nonhuman population of their city, and if that information leaked out, they risk the world discovering that humans were not alone on the planet. Meanwhile, Theo is still grappling with that information himself. He is trying to treat his nonhuman neighbors just like anyone else, which is easy to do as they're mostly more pleasant to be around than the fully human folk he's met in Whitelake so far. But they all seem to know something about his late great-uncle that they're not telling him. And when he finds a magically sealed puzzle box that turns out to contain his great-uncle's signet ring, all he has is more questions. Between the increasingly aggressive thief, Theo's attempts to get his worldview to accept magic as another fact of his life, and his mother's pressure to pursue a career that is less appealing every day, Theo isn't sure what he's doing anymore. Then he gets a call from the thief, revealing that he has Theo's friends. Can Theo rescue his friends, protect the secret of the magical community, and sort his own life out?