Skulduggery Pleasant
core novel 2007 Skulduggery Pleasant
Record
| First published | 2007 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.18 (74,417 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| Page count | 371 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780007254453 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
After the death of her horror-novelist uncle Gordon Edgley, twelve-year-old Stephanie Edgley inherits his mansion and learns his fiction concealed a real hidden world of magic. She is rescued from an assassin by a skeleton detective named Skulduggery Pleasant, who reveals that Gordon was murdered, and adopts the magical alias Valkyrie Cain as she joins his investigation. The pair, aided by allies including the tailor Ghastly Bespoke and the librarian China Sorrows, trace the killing to Nefarian Serpine, a former general of the sorcerer Mevolent who is hunting for the Sceptre of the Ancients, an artifact hidden in a maze beneath Gordon's mansion. Serpine intends to use the weapon to restore the tyrannical Faceless Ones to the world, and Valkyrie and Skulduggery race to stop him from reaching it first while Valkyrie adjusts to her new, dangerous double life.
Where it sits
- Universe: Skulduggery Pleasant
- Series: The Skulduggery Pleasant main sequence core; position 1 of 18 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Derek Landy
Awards (verified)
- Bord Gais Energy Irish Book of the Decade (Overall), 2010: won; A public reader vote covering the decade's Irish-published books; Skulduggery Pleasant (2007) won.
Notes
- From the series record (The Skulduggery Pleasant main sequence): The main numbered sequence concluded with A Soul Full of Shadows (2026); several companion novellas and short-story collections in the same setting exist but are not catalogued in this admission.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Skulduggery Pleasant main sequence: position 1 of 18: next Playing with Fire (2008)
Sources
- FantasticFiction: Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skulduggery_Pleasant_(novel)
- The Irish Times: Skulduggery Pleasant named Irish Book of the Decade
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