• The Ivory Horizon
    The humidity of the Congo Basin was a physical weight, a damp shroud that clung to Colonel Alistair Finch's starch-collared tunic. It was 1884, and the map of Africa was being carved into jagged pieces by men in distant European parlors. Finch, a man of the Queen's service and a devotee of the Royal Geographical Society, was not interested in the carving; he was interested in the void. Finch...
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  • The Plague of Blackwood Manor
    I found the first one in the scullery. It was three days after Sir Sebastian returned from India, and the house was still settling into its old rhythms after the disruption of his absence. I had risen early, as was my custom, to inspect the kitchens before the cook came down. The gas lamps were still dim, casting long shadows across the flagstones, when I saw her—Martha, the kitchen maid—lying...
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  • Blood and Magnolias
    I returned to Magnolia House in the rain. Not the gentle rain of spring or the warm rain of summer, but the kind of rain that comes in April and refuses to stop for three days, turning the red clay roads to soup and filling the cypress swamps until the water creeps up the porch steps and into the floorboards. Miles stood on the porch when I arrived, his right hand resting on the railing, his...
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  • The Rust Belt
    ACT I: THE LOSS Mike Kowalski lost his job on a Thursday. It was a small thing, in the way that the end of the world often is: a meeting in a conference room that smelled like stale coffee and resignation, a manager named David who spoke in words like "synergy" and "right-sizing" and "strategic realignment," and then Mike was handed an envelope with two weeks' pay and told to clear out his...
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  • The Starlight Corridor
    ACT I: THE AWAKENING The jazz poured from the speakeasy on Forty-second Street like water from a broken dam, and Thomas Callahan stood on the corner, listening to it the way a starving man listens to the smell of bread. He was twenty-four, Irish on his father's side, poor on both, and possessed of a mind that saw patterns where other men saw only chaos. Three years earlier, Thomas had arrived...
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  • The Gilded Altar
    ## Act I: The Outset The New York of 1912 was a city of gold and grime, where the skyscrapers reached for a heaven that the people on the street had long since forgotten. Leo stood at the center of it all, not as a titan of industry, but as a ghost in the machine. He was a painter of the invisible, a man who saw the city not as a grid of streets, but as a pulsing network of longing and despair....
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  • The Last Operator
    Harlan Graves sat on the base of the radio telescope every night and listened to the wind. He was fifty-two years old and had not worked since the coal mine closed. He had been a miner for twenty-eight years, which meant he had spent more of his life underground than above it. When the mine closed, he emerged into a world that had no use for men who knew how to dig holes in the earth. The town...
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  • Blood and Magnolias
    The bottle arrived on a Tuesday in the autumn of 1928, carried by a woman from the North who called herself Dr. Emily Vanderbilt and who spoke with the clipped, precise accent of someone who had never had to ask permission to enter a room. I met her at the railway station, where the mist was rising from the Mississippi like breath from a sleeping thing, and the magnolia trees that lined the...
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  • The House on Blackwater Bayou
    The house sat on the edge of Blackwater Bayou like a woman who had inherited a fortune she did not want and could not refuse. It was large -- not mansion-large, but plantation-large, the kind of size that implied generations of people living under the same roof, eating at the same table, sharing the same secrets. The cypress trees surrounded it the way guards surround a king who has stopped...
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  • The Weight of Dust
    ## Act I: The Outset Oakhaven was a town where the wind only blew in one direction: toward the graveyard. It was a place of rusted silos and grey skies, a relic of an industrial boom that had ended forty years ago, leaving behind a population of people who were as hollow as the factories they once worked in. Toby was nineteen, with a restless energy that felt like a foreign language in...
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