Book excerpt: Private Inquisitor Jak Barley hates adventures, and with good reasons after barely surviving past cases involving vicious piss dragons, vengeful necromancers, annoying assassins, cranky goblins, gruesome ghouls and angry old gods—and that’s not even including having a terrifying witch as a future mother-in-law. It’s about to begin again. How is Jak to find the heir to a throne missing since an infant—and find the prince before foreign agents do? And why are Ghennison Viper Mages trying to blast Jak into oily smoking scraps of charred meat and bones? Then there’s the rampaging thirty-foot tall idol that can only be stopped when its faraway wand (remote) is found. Lucky for Jak he has help from his alchemist and half-brother Olmsted Aunderthorn; Morgana, his intended, a witchling in training; and Lorenzo Spasm, a mysterious friend from another world where magic does not exist.