Music, art, and magic meet in this spellbinding tale about a young witch recruited to a mysterious coven that draws its powers from the stars. When the coven discovers there is an imposter among them, she must help find and stop them.
THE EIGHTY-NINTH WITCH
The Observatory Series, Book 1
by Dimitri Balcaen
ReadMore Publishing, April 2023
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)
Seren has enjoyed her cozy life by the sea with her Granny Calloway, until the day she is whisked away to the mysterious Observatory to join the coven of eighty-eight witches who help protect the universe, along with members of the Zodiac.
There must always be that eighty-eight witches at the Observatory in order to keep the balance of the magic. But when there suddenly turns out to be one witch too many at the initiation, the search begins for who among them is the one who doesn’t belong.
Seren and her new friends take it up on themselves to solve the mystery of who the intruder is and what her purpose might be. Is this mysterious false witch here to bring down the Observatory? Is she responsible for the growing disappearances of the members of the Zodiac?
As Seren develops her magical powers, she will uncover more secrets about the Observatory than she ever imagined.
Books 2-4 under contract.
Dimitri Balcaen has written several books for Readmore, including the Grimoire series and the Peter & Pan series, amongst others.
Cassie Murdoch is haunted by the black-eyed woman that killed her mother. For her mental health, Cassie is sent away to live with her estranged grandmother on Tide Island. While there, Cassie searches for clues to her mother’s old life and why she fled her home never to return. With help from her grandmother’s secretive errand boy, Henry, Cassie unravels a terrible family secret: a curse that spans generations.
It’s 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with…normal business. The dead die. You bury them. End of story. That’s how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny—Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore’s soft-hearted daughter—have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter, Luna, alone. But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy’s body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it’s clear that the Strigoi—the original vampire—are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town. As more folks in town turn up dead, and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi’s return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes the dead aren’t the only things you want to keep buried. A crackling mystery-horror novel with big-hearted characters and blood-soaked Southern charm, Bless Your Heart is a gasp-worthy delight from start to finish.
Iggy Guerra is out of prison, but his homecoming is anything but smooth. His beloved mother is gone, his grief-stricken father, Armando, is deep in debt, and they are about to lose the butcher shop that has been in their family for generations. Iggy must earn his father’s lost trust in order to save La Carnicería Guerra from the threats imposed by a new rival business, a vigilante activist, and big-game hunter Orin, who has dragged Armando into his dangerous money-making schemes deep in the Everglades, where more than secrets are buried. Iggy will wrestle with the beauty and the danger of the place he calls home as he tries to save his family—without losing himself forever. Sharp as a butcher knife gleaming in the Miami sun, Alejandro Nodarse’s BLOOD IN THE CUT opens onto a deeply personal vision of the streets and swamps of Miami, where the roots are crooked but strong as mangroves.