On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in Lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, a photographer named Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality—a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragonpoints and Tibetan mysticism where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica’s father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White’s disappearance was no accident: he was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present.

Until Veronica finds Leo… “Black and white magic, time travel, the choicer arcane of Tibetan Buddhism, and a titanic struggle to the death at the top of the Empire State Building…Satisfying as the storytelling is, though, the deeper pleasures here stem from the author’s imaginative and idiosyncratic scholarship, by means of which the uncanny is made to seem commonplace and the commonplace unfathomable.” —New Yorker

“The hard-boiled detective novel meets The Tibetan Book of the Dead…Veronica is a dramatic literary achievement unlike anything else in contemporary American fiction.” —Edward Hirsch

“Hip, sexy…superbly lyrical…a novel in which anything can happen.”—New York Times Book Review