Philip Pullman The Tiger in the Well

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Even when life is good you are never safe. Prepare to have the ground ripped from under your feet. There is a man, if man he is, who few have seen but many fear. They call him the Tzaddik, and say he has a Dybbuk for a servant--a little imp from hell who waits on him. He squats like a fat, malevolent spider hidden at the centre of a web of international misery and mayhem. And now the Tzaddik is travelling to England, to London, to Twickenham… It is 1881 and all is sunny and well in the life of Sally Lockhart. Her friends Jim Taylor and Webster Gorland are away travelling the world, but Sally lives with her darling baby daughter Harriet in a fine house in Twickenham with servants and a thriving business as a financial consultant. Life has never been so good. Unbeknownst to Sally everything is about to change. She will soon need every ounce of her courage, every fibre of her moral being and all her native wit and resolution. She will be utterly alone. She is about to learn at dangerously close quarters all about the tiger in the well…