The snappily dressed Skulduggery Pleasant popped into Derek Landy’s mind while he was traveling. Within months the vision was down on paper in the first of the Irish writer’s best-selling fantasy novels, Skulduggery Pleasant, that was published in 2007 and was this year voted Irish Book of The Decade.

Landy, from County Dublin, has just released the fifth book in the series, Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil, which follows Pleasant and his teenage sidekick Valkyrie Cain as they try to protect a known killer from an unstoppable assassin.

Description: Skulduggery Pleasant is back, and reunited with his original head. But all is not well in the magical world – for one thing, foreign powers are conspiring to take over the Irish Sanctuary, and for another thing, Valkyrie has discovered she might be the sorceress set to destroy the world. The problem is, she doesn’t feel she can tell Skulduggery what she’s learned – and that’s how all the trouble starts. With Valkyrie on a quest of her own, to seal her name and prevent her evil destiny from coming to pass, Skulduggery and the gang are even more vulnerable. Which is a shame, because remember those thousands of remnants, imprisoned in the Midnight Hotel? Well, now they’re out. Not only that but they believe Valkyrie is their messiah. And that means thousands of wicked souls, desperate to get to Valkyrie, willing to kill anyone in their way – Oh, and because they can possess any body, they could be ANYONE. Now Skulduggery, Valkyrie, Ghastly and Tanith can trust no one. Not even each other …

Book Talk is currently running an interview with Landy by Belinda Goldsmith. You can catch it here: Derek Landy

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