I kind of feel like these would have been better books without all the invented vocabulary, but I did like the quasi-Victorian? Cockneyish? language of the street dwellers. In an alternate future dystopian London, people with extrasensory abilities (clairvoyants, or “voyants”) are hunted down by the government; because their very existence is illegal, voyants band together in street gangs and mobs to survive. Our heroine Paige has powers that put her pretty high up in her gang; however, when she is captured by the government, she finds out that captured voyants actually become enslaved in a crazy medieval prison (it’s the old Oxford campus) run by – wait for it – aliens! The aliens are using the psychic energy of the voyants to fight a war on another plane of existence entirely, with the government’s cooperation. The insanity just keeps ratcheting up. The first book has plenty of action but honestly feels mostly like setup, introducing mad amounts of vocabulary alongside crowds of characters and doing its best to convince you of the multiple layers of weird that comprise this world; the second book was a little more focused. Two books in I’m still honestly not sure I completely buy the premise, but at least Shannon’s writing is smooth and the characters are well-crafted.