19th-century "folklore collectors" Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm are con artists who perform bogus exorcisms of "evil enchantments" while traveling from village to village in French-occupied Germany. The two soon find themselves ensnared in a genuinely supernatural crisis involving the curse of the Mirror Queen and other such fantastical marvels as the Big Bad Wolf, the Gingerbread Man, and other truly enchanted flora and fauna.

"Dortchen Wild lives in the small German kingdom of Hesse-Cassel in the early 19th century. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to the boy next door, the handsome but very poor fairy tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm. It is a time of tyranny and terror: Napoleon Bonaparte wants to conquer all of Europe, and Hesse-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, Wilhelm and his brothers quietly rebel by preserving...

"Bavaria, 1776. When Albrecht Durer the Much Much Younger's Frog Prints go missing, he knows exactly where to turn for help. Gretel (yes, that Gretel), now thirty-five and still living with her gluttonous brother Hans, is the country's most famous private investigator, and she leaps at the opportunity to travel to cosmopolitan Nuremberg to take on the case. But amid the hubbub of the city's annual sausage festival, Gretel struggles to find any clues...

Featuring more than 200 tales, this book includes tales such as: "The Sleeping Beauty", "Rumpelstiltskin", "Hansel and Gretel", "Snow White" among others - and many little-known treasures such as "The Juniper Tree", "Clever Gretel", "King Thrushbeard", and "The Singing, Soaring Lark."