The Anubis Gates

Brendan Doyle, a scholar of nineteenth-century English literature, is hired to guide a group of wealthy tourists to an 1810 lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, using magical gates a cabal of Egyptian sorcerers accidentally tore open across time. When Doyle misses his ride home, he is stranded in a London ruled from below by a guild of beggars, a clown named Horrabin who maims his own minions, a body-hopping werewolf, and magicians trying to raise the old gods of Egypt to break the British Empire. Powers ties every thread into a single fated knot, and the mild academic has to become a con man and swordsman to survive the city's secret underneath.