Ballad of the Bone Road

In the glittering city of Port Astor, where fae roads criss-cross human highways and ghosts whisper to the living, nothing is ever as it seems. From Sunburst Award-winning author A. C. Wise, this utterly original dark fantasy tale of faith and fanaticism, doomed love and desperate bargains is perfect for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Ava Reid. Port Astor is a city of ghosts. Once home to the beautiful, brutal courts of the fae, forty years ago they vanished without explanation - and Port Astor decided to forget. Brix and Bellefeather are paranormal investigators, working to keep Port Astor's wraiths and spectres from consuming the city. Both have hauntings of their own: Belle shares her body with a demon, Belizial; Brix has trapped the soul of his dead fiancée in the world of the living, unwilling to let her go. While investigating the glamorous and notoriously haunted Peony Hotel, Brix and Belle come across a young couple tangled up in one of the city's most infamous tales. Jimmy Valentine, silver screen idol and one-time favorite of a fae queen, has returned to haunt the Peony. But Jimmy is no mere ghost, and Brix and Belle soon realize his return is more intimately tied to their own hauntings than they could ever have imagined. The fae have not forgotten that Port Astor once belonged to them. And their Hollow Queen won't give up her kingdom so easily.

A.C. Wise is the author of the novels Wendy, Darling, and Hooked, along with the recent short story collection, The Ghost Sequences. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and has been a finalist for the Nebula Awards, Stoker, World Fantasy, Locus, British Fantasy, Aurora, Lambda, and Ignyte Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a review column to Apex Magazine.