Moonshine Express — Poppet

For June Dubois, it was disconcerting enough to be sent an exclusive invitation for a journey in the alien luxury environment of what she assumes is the famous Royal Scotsman train - but as the gleaming blood-coloured carriages pull away from the rainy platform into the night to the strain of formal bagpipes, what she finds is far stranger. The Moonshine Express is a train between reality and elsewhere, through a warped past and present - a train of ghosts and horrors, dilemmas and history and tricks of contract. A train of dead men's bones and crying souls. As June struggles to work out just who she is and what this train and its occupants want with her, this is also a journey through the melting reality of her own mind, and the darkness that lurks beyond the train window is not the normal impenetrable railway darkness . . . Poppet's writing style is filled with the strange and the brashly humorous mixed with the violent and visceral - with a good dose of dark romance and glamour thrown in as well. It's a heady and pungent blend that comes like a slap in the face in the dark, leaving you unsure whether to love or to fight back in panic - or both. Moonshine Express is her first appearance between hard covers.