Lalka to najsłynniejsza powieść Bolesława Prusa, pierwotnie ukazywała się na łamach „Kuriera Codziennego", po raz pierwszy została wydana w 1890 roku. Publikacja zrealizowana w ramach projektu Wolne Lektury (http://wolnelektury.pl). Reprodukcja cyfrowa wykonana przez Bibliotekę Narodową z egzemplarza pochodzącego ze zbiorów BN. Opracowanie redakcyjne i przypisy: Aleksandra Sekuła, Olga Sutkowska. Wydawca: Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska

Five years have passed since the series of shocking and brutal murders known as 'the Tarot Killings' swept across Daleclay. Yet now, in the "present" of the early 1950s, amidst the scenery of two similarly typical American towns - Regal Falls, and the neighboring Pierton - a potentially deadlier menace has begun to simmer... Several school-age boys - each with an organ connected to one of the vital senses, removed from the body - have been murdered; a local history professor, along with his cerebral assistant, deduce that waxen symbols purposely discarded at the scenes point towards the practices of an ancient, Mithraic cult. Simultaneously summoned to offer the Regal Falls police a more unorthodox kind of aid, is the renegade detective known as Troy Porter - himself still struggling against a near-breakdown from the events five years prior. Along with Troy likewise arrives a promising adept of journalism - his junior by several years, albeit perchance kindred in spirit - whom the detective befriends during a night-train to their shared destination. The un-folding murders seem to actually have their origin in the disappearance of two companions from the local elementary school, fifteen years beforehand: Edward Lansing, whose parents afterwards create the eponymous Mary and John Lansing Foundation - an extended 'Protect-the-Children' project - and Gilbert Maxwell, whose own surviving family have avoided the public, ever since. Soon, the crime scene in Regal Falls spills over into a multitude of increasingly savage, albeit seemingly random, killings which follow the boundaries of neither age nor sex. Three additional 'top-tier' detectives are recruited, as vial options dissipate; and Bethany Chaiken - the precocious, thirteen-year-old cousin of the professor's assistant - now unyieldingly joins Troy in efforts that grow less sanctioned, and more forlorn, by the hour. How to rencounter a vier, who has attained near-omnipotence over the human condition itself?

Daleclay - a town in the late forties of the previous century. Following the death of his closest friend and comrade, in what was declared to be a freak-accident during the Second World-War, Jonah Elzware - an essentially individualistic and non-conformist veteran, notorious for both his incurable romanticism as well as his open distrust towards any form of authority - returns to the town in which he was raised, after a prolonged and unexplained absence. The purpose of Jonah's return to Daleclay is apparently two-fold: assuming proprietorship of the home and hotel which he recently inherited from a deceased relative, and also fulfilling the last wish of his fallen comrade by acting as an unofficial guardian and mentor to the latter's now-teenage son. The superficially mundane and 'run-of-the-mill' town soon finds itself becoming rapidly unhinged, however, upon the arrival of a highly eccentric yet wholly controversial public figure to Jonah's hotel, and the gruesome murder of a celebrated, local matriarch which occurs shortly afterwards - a bloodied and folded tarot card at the scene prompting the perpetrator to be at once dubbed 'the Tarot-Killer.' Within a short span of time, the Tarot-Killer strikes again; house divided against house, a visibly-ineffective police department itself now on the verge, and all other established avenues of help becoming exhausted and obsolete, an unlikely alliance of residents from the darker corners of Daleclay desperately bands together, in hope of unmasking the killer and bringing the murders to an end - only to instead gradually uncover a truth much more direful, yet infinitely more tragic, than initially conceived.