A cozy urban fantasy about the Petersburg hontons is the third book in Irina Ivanova’s mystical series. Here, the familiar, measured honton routine begins to crack at the seams: a fake website surfaces, anxious claims arrive insisting that the hontons “aren’t real,” and at the agency, a character appears whom they were least expecting to see.
The honton daily life flows as usual: to swallow someone, to have tea with someone, to explain to someone how to be a honton the right way (and to put on a shaman’s dance with a drum around your dark side). And in the pauses between orders—love, get exhausted, settle into the role of a parent, fear changes, and still go on living.
But… where do these strange complaints about “replacement” hontons come from? Could the fake website be feeding customers costumed impersonators? And, of course, just when they least expect it, the agency is visited by the one they hadn’t counted on. Only, it seems he really had reasons to do evil: a dark past won’t let go—and his reflection in the mirror bares its teeth, giving him no peace, day or night, even on the darkest one…