Private Mage, by Sydney J. Bounds (Hardcover)

Picture a London that took a different turn—a city where the talent for magic flourished instead of the physical sciences. Carpets drift above streets clogged with horse-drawn wagons and cycles, crystal balls carry the messages a telephone never got around to inventing, and a licensed practitioner can be hired to handle the troubles ordinary folk cannot.

That practitioner keeps a dingy office on a hot, dusty road, feet on the desk and crystal ball gathering dust until the next client climbs the stairs. The cases arrive in strange shapes: a fortune that reeks of murder, a vanished colleague, a rogue sorcerer loose in the fog, a haunting that refuses to behave. Cracking them takes more than a spell—it takes the nerve and patience of a born detective.

Collected here for the first time, thirteen linked tales fuse hard-boiled crime with gaslamp wonder, trailing one mage-for-hire through a city where every case bends the rules of both magic and the law.