The stage beneath her began to turn, and then suddenly it was not a stage, but a carousel populated by wolves and wild dogs and other dark beasts. They were fixed in place on the carousel, and yet somehow they were alive, roaring and howling as the carousel spun faster and faster through the darkness. The bench she'd been sitting on had become a vicious hound. It yapped and growled as she clung to its black fur in terror. Chloe McBride has some reservations about accepting her elderly great-aunts' invitation to spend part of the summer with them in Little Venice, but her initial reluctance is outweighed by her curiosity about the mysterious key that came with her aunts' note. She's also anxious to put the humiliating memory of a disastrous piano recital as far behind her as possible. Chloe's great-aunts tell her the legend of her great-grandfather, Dante Magnus, an ambitious magician who vanished without a trace almost a century earlier, and Chloe begins to search for clues to his disappearance. When her investigations eventually lead her to a mysterious rosewood box, which has been hidden for almost a hundred years, Chloe's belief in the power of magic forces her to confront her own fears and ambitions. Rachel Dunstan Muller was born in California and immigrated to Canada as a young child. With the exception of a year in Northern Ireland, she has lived on the West Coast of British Columbia since the age of ten. She has been an English tutor, a ferry worker, a newspaper columnist and a training consultant, but writing fiction is her favorite occupation. Rachel currently lives in a small Vancouver Island community with her husband, four children, and an ever-changing assortment of cats, rabbits, birds, rodents, amphibians and fish.