Despite his swanky family heritage, Jack Bootle-Cadogan is a normal, unassuming kind of kid - until the day he is bitten by a stray dog in a graveyard. Next thing he knows, he is sprouting some sort of beard, and are those fangs developing at the back of his mouth? He can't go to school looking this Ruff! Thanks to a family curse, Jack is in fact destined to become Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead: half-human, half-jackal. Only he can perform the secret rituals which allow the souls of the dead to pass safely through to the Afterlife. Can our unlikely hero rise to the challenge - and still manage to win the school long distance run?