I left the towpath for the street. Within minutes I was lost. After wandering around for nearly an hour, I found myself at Russell Square, an area filled with cops and tourists headed to the British Museum. Lines of schoolchildren in matching uniforms, a cluster of well-dressed matrons who followed an Asian woman bearing a red umbrella like a standard. I made a wide detour around a couple of cops, stopping to buy a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans from a street vendor. I put them on, found an alcove where I sneaked a mouthful of Jack Daniel’s, and cut over to a main drag where the street sign read SHAFTESBURY AVENUE.

Booze and cheap shades and pharmaceutical speed made the late-afternoon glow like burnished steel. Without the weight of my camera, my new bag felt preternaturally light, almost empty. I comforted myself by thinking that on the Wall of Death it’s best to travel light.

Also by Elizabeth Hand

Cass Neary Novels

Generation Loss

Available Dark

Hard Light

The Book of Lamps and Banners

Fire.

Wylding Hall

Errantry: Strange Stories

Radiant Days

Glimmering

Illyria

Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories

Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol

Mortal Love

Bibliomancy: Four Novellas

Black Light

Last Summer at Mars Hill and Other Stories

Waking the Moon

Icarus Descending

Aestival Tide

Winterlong

Praise for Elizabeth Hand’s
Curious Toys

One of the Year’s Best Books

LitHub • Chicago Public Library • CrimeReads

Finalist for the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel of the Year

“Brilliant…Vivid…Pin is a first-rate heroine…Hand juxtaposes Pin’s concealment of her gender with the killer’s obsession with dressing dolls, making Pin’s anxiety about her identity all the more resonant. Curious Toys is packed with evocative historical detail of Chicago…Hand’s rendering of Darger’s Tourettic tics is just one of the many deft touches in her wonderfully imaginative and richly delivered narrative.”

—Ivy Pochoda, New York Times Book Review

“Elizabeth Hand places her kaleidoscopic new novel at the intersection of delight and danger…With short, breathlessly paced chapters and constantly shifting points of view, Curious Toys is itself like a carnival ride: alternatively dazzling and terrifying, disorienting and marvelous…In her search for the killer, Pin fights to take a dangerous man off the street and comes to grips with her own sister’s disappearance. But she’s not just trying to solve the case—she’s trying to solve the puzzle of her own identity, and to save herself.”

—Amy Stewart, Washington Post

“Pin is a remarkable young sleuth…Curious Toys is a thriller to be savored—tough, funny, strange, and revelatory.”

—Michael Berry, Portland Press Herald