Nearly twenty years after the events of Mortal Engines and Predator's Gold, Tom and Hester have finally settled down. The wild adventures of their past are now little more than stories to tell their daughter, Wren, who relishes their adventures just a little bit too much. Her foolhardiness gets her kidnapped-and worse, whisked right back into the very world her parents thought they'd left behind. To rescue her, Tom and Hester must jump headfirst back into danger. Their pursuit will reunite them with enemies they thought they'd left behind forever, will ask of them sacrifices that no parent can make, and will cost one of them everything that matters most.

Review

"Some 16 years after the city of Anchorage, with Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw aboard, found refuge by grounding itself on the shores of North America (Predator's Gold, 2004), its peace is disturbed. While Tom has thrived, Hester has found that her constitution, forged in violence, does not accept calm easily. Their teenaged daughter Wren chafes at the lack of action, so different from her parents' stories. So when the Lost Boys appear out of her parents' past, she happily steals the fabled Tin Book of Anchorage for them-and in no short order is captured and sold into slavery on the pleasure raft-city of Brighton, with Tom and Hester in hot pursuit. Wren has plunged into a terrifying world, in which the Green Storm, led by the Stalker Fang, busily makes war on those traction cities that are left, and the Tin Book is the animated corpse's next target. The futuristic setting is remorselessly harsh: Mercy is a hot commodity, and a potential liability. Brighton's fiery end paves the way for the concluding volume in this extraordinary series, which tests both protagonists and readers to their utmost." (Fiction. 12+) Kirkus Reviews