The Ring of Solomon

The Ring of Solomon is the prequel Jonathan Stroud published in 2010, set roughly three thousand years before the events of the Bartimaeus trilogy. Jerusalem here is a city where magic is the machinery of empire: Solomon rules with a ring that lets him compel spirits to his will, and the seventeen magicians who serve him spend their days looking for an advantage over one another.

Bartimaeus is summoned back into service after his previous master dies in a manner he is entirely responsible for, and the Egyptian magician who takes him on, Khaba, hands him the kind of work that makes the djinn long for the Other Place. On the other side of the story, the Queen of Sheba refuses Solomon's proposal of marriage, receives a demand for a fortune in frankincense and answers it by sending her most loyal guard captain to assassinate him instead.

Stroud keeps the two strands travelling toward each other, and much of the pleasure of the book is in the voice: Bartimaeus narrates with footnotes, complaints and a very long view of human behaviour, while Asmira's chapters stay close to the ground and to what the mission costs her. Solomon's Jerusalem is a city where spirits do the building work and magicians take the credit, and the ring at the centre of it is the most dangerous object either of them has ever been near. It stands on its own, so a reader who has never met the djinn before can begin here.