When Perrin was so desperate that he applied for a job with the Bureau of Magic Abuse, there were two things he didn’t realise. One, that he might actually get the job and two, that it would involve working with magic sniffers.

And what an annoyance the creatures are. They keep him up at night, need to feed on expensive fresh fruit and cause him embarrassment.

A new inn opens in town and patrons flock to it. Perrin checks it out for forbidden magic, finds none but something doesn’t add up. Is it the stranger, clearly a wizard, who makes little effort to cover up his illegal activities? Is it the owner of the new inn, who can’t possibly have accumulated enough money to buy the place? Or is it the unfailingly raving reviews?

Something fishy is going on, and his boss at the Bureau doesn’t even want him to investigate. But Perrin has never let that stop him.

Picture this: you’ve somehow come into the possession of a dragon (long story–you can read the previous book if you really want to know, but it’s kinda embarrassing, so you don’t need to).

And you need to return that dragon to the place it came from.

You’ve tried putting it on a truck–but it destroyed the truck.

You’ve tried putting it on the train–but it destroyed the carriage.

Now you’ve put the dragon in a warehouse while you figure out what to do, but–

You guessed it: the dragon destroys the warehouse.

Tell me, why wouldn’t you trick some rich merchant into lending you the only thing you haven’t yet tried: a boat.

Trouble is, the merchant’s price is that you return an old artefact to the whale kingdom along the way.

Whales are not nice. They’re very big. They’re cranky. And, here is a secret: they hate dragons.

They especially hate dragons.

Preparations are underway for the society wedding of the year and Perrin gets the unenviable task of checking the kitchens for illegal magic.

In the midst of the frantic preparations, Frida, his most experienced magic sniffer, gets upset. If a magic sniffer is upset, there is magic.

No one appreciates Perrin’s discovery. Not his boss or the mayor—the wedding is a society event and can’t be delayed. Not those making money from it: the cooks in the kitchens, the seamstresses in the workshops, the bakeries making—wait, did anyone say fairy bread?

Behind the doors of the bakery lurks a secret too disturbing to be kept hidden.

Tamba, the town between the realms where magic is illegal, is itself dependent on suffering by magic creatures on an industrial scale.

Industrial relations scale, that is.