The sea is coming…
A TALE OF THREE CITIES by Elana Gomel is a sharp, shadowy, and hallucinatory speculative noir blending of magic, murder, and mystery! The dream sea and its secrets are waiting for you!
In a city built on myth and soaked in rain, truth is the most dangerous thing you can find.
When a women’s corpse explodes in the rain outside the Temple and floods half the Hill, Mara Raven is pulled away from the search for her missing husband and back into the job she never for: using her strange Power to fish for killers in a city rotting from the inside out.
Mara Raven doesn’t believe in gods or monsters. The only thing she puts her faith in is the dream-sea — an eerie, otherworldly current only she can dive into, dragging up secrets others prefer to stay buried. The Temple wants silence, preferring to pray to the Slaughtered Ones, long dead ancestors Mara doesn’t believe ever existed. The constables want results. And someone else, known only as the Revealer, wants to open the ancient Gate to the so-called Abode of the Ancestors, an act which may prove disastrous.
As the city drowns in its myths and murder, Mara follows a trail of blood, lies, and twisted devotion as nightmares from the dream-sea begin to bleed into reality. A seal has been broken. Something is coming through that Gate, and it’s not forgiveness for the city’s sins.
Read an exclusive excerpt of A Tale of Three Cities!
The phone call came close to midnight.
Mara Raven was awake. She seldom went to bed before dawn, preferring to wander around her large, empty apartment, hoping against hope to hear a knock at the door and see Ronald standing there. In the year since her husband went missing, she had become an insomniac. It was beginning to interfere with her dreamfishing.
The harsh ringing of the phone yanked her from her reverie.
She knew who was calling, of course. Her mentor. Her benefactor. Her only friend. Which was the reason she stared at the shrilling apparatus with a mixture of apprehension and reluctance. But there was no avoiding Mr. Seal when he wanted Mara. She grasped the handset, accidentally knocking the ornate bronze machine off its stand.
It clattered to the ground and went silent. Cursing, Mara put it back and replaced the handset. Since Mr. Seal had installed this newfangled device in her apartment, she had used it only twice, and always for communication with him. Mara was a loner by nature; and it was not easy, being a loner in a City that was bursting at the seams as the growing population huddled together, close to the Temple of the Ancestors for companionship and protection.
The phone squealed again. Mara picked up the handset and spoke into it.
“Good evening, Mr. Seal.”
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Mara.” His soft voice poured like soothing oil over her irritation.
“What is it this time?”
“Murder, of course.”
Of course. He would not waste her Power on anything less than that.
“But the chief constable said he did not want me to consult on violent crimes anymore.”
Mara was not privy to the endless jockeying for positions in the Temple and the Animal House, though, unlike most people in First City, she was insulated from the fallout of power shifts by her husband’s money. But she knew that the chief constable was less than enthusiastic about employing a woman.
“We have a new chief constable."
“Really?”
Another shakeup in the Animal House? Well, if it allowed her to do what she wanted to do, which was dreamfishing, she was on board with it.
“What’s the new constable’s name?” she asked.
“Adrian Jay-Mole."
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Mara snickered. Double names, indicating two totems, were uncommon and either a mark of distinction or a vulgar heresy, depending on who you asked.
“That’s some combination!”
“Sky and earth; good for a constabulary man, don’t you think? Anyway, he is more…open-minded than his predecessor. And this is a shocking case!”
“Who is the victim?”
“A woman.”
A domestic? Mara hoped it did not have an obvious solution. Complicated cases allowed her to dive deeper into the dream-sea. Except, of course, the one complicated case that she needed to solve above all else and that the dream-sea refused to help her with. Her husband’s disappearance.
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