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When two members of Scion's security force come after her, Paige's talent defends her so powerfully that she inadvertently kills one and drives the other mad. She ends up in Sheol I — a penal colony for voyants set up in the secret city of Oxford, far from London's skyscrapers. "Stone walls, wooden doors. Leaded windows glazed with deep red and amethyst," Shannon writes. Sheol I, Paige discovers, is the home base for a supernatural ruling race of Rephaim, who set up Scion's puppet government 200 years before.

The Rephaim gather the most promising human voyants in once-a-decade harvests they call "bone seasons." These prisoners become slaves. Their Rephaim — Paige calls them the Reph — masters beat them, and feed on their auras and blood.

Paige is claimed by a Reph she calls Warden. He is tall, with heavy lidded yellow eyes and dark honey gold skin. "He was the single most beautiful and terrible thing I'd ever laid eyes on." He is to coach her through a series of deadly battles to become a red-jacket, part of a battalion risking death and mutilation to defend Oxford against the monstrous Emim — "mindless, bestial creatures with a taste for human flesh" — who live outside its walls. Once she moves into Warden's quarters at Magdalen, she discovers he has a clandestine life, and a mysterious kind streak.

Shannon has remarkable talent for world-building. Her imagined parallels to London and Oxford are cunningly layered over the original cities (there are maps) and filled with vivid detail, although the extensive voyant classification system hierarchy grows tedious.

But her most sublime otherworldly creation is the complex, ever evolving, scrappy yet touching Paige Mahoney. Shannon illuminates Paige's growing awareness of the new world she inhabits, and the moral choices she faces, with great empathy. She emphasizes Paige's endearing unwillingness to submit, which draws her into danger time and again. Paige struggles with her gift, which is unstable, not within her conscious control; it seems most powerful when she is defending herself to the death. She dreams of escape. She fights bravely to survive. She protects the weak and rallies furiously against overwhelming force. Paige is a credible hero. I want her to win. And with that, Shannon has me hooked.

Read an excerpt of The Bone Season