Available in bookstores now, Elana Gomel’s A Tale of Three Cities will keep you turning pages late into the night.
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 wished 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.
An Excerpt from 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.
About the Author: Elana Gomel
Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic with a long list of books and articles, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is the author of more than a hundred stories, several novellas, and six novels of dark fantasy and science fiction. Her latest fiction publications are the dark fairy tale Nightwood, and Girl of Light, a historical fantasy.
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