By a Living Hand: A Paranormal Mystery Romance of a Ghost, a Murdered Prince, and the Woman Who Gave Him a Face

She builds faces for the dead. This one built one back.

Dr. Celia Beckman has spent twenty years pressing clay over bone in a Chicago basement, and twenty years not telling anyone what else she can do — that the dead leave a residue, and she can read it.

Case No. 4022 comes out of a collapsed embankment with no name, no file, and nobody looking. When Celia finishes his face at two in the morning, she recognizes him. So would half of Europe. The royal house of Aldervik has spent twenty-two years insisting he is alive and living quietly abroad.

Then the north end of her lab drops nine degrees, and a man in a good wool coat asks her to say out loud that she can see him.

He calls himself Klaus. He cannot touch anything. He cannot go more than nineteen feet from his own bones. He cannot be heard by another living person on earth. He is also funny, and unbearably kind, and the first person in ten years to make Celia want to come home to something.

Naming him means going up against people who erase men for a living.

Freeing him means a fourteenth-century rite with a price taken the moment she speaks it — ten years off the far end of her life, whether it works or not.

Celia already lost a decade to grief. This time she gets to choose who takes it.

What’s inside

• A ghost you can’t touch and forced proximity measured in feet — nineteen of them
• A slow burn that stays lit for three hundred pages
• A heroine in her forties who is extremely good at her job
• A genuinely warm, genuinely funny hero who has been alone for twenty-two years
• A real cold-case investigation — dental records, chain of custody, a shoebox in a hall cupboard
• A royal cover-up, a fourteenth-century manuscript, and a bargain with a cost
• A best friend who tells the truth, a detective who is nobody’s fool, and a badly behaved dog

For readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and A Discovery of Witches — and anyone who has ever wanted a ghost story that takes both the ghost and the story seriously.

Content notes: murder (described), grief and widowhood, institutional coercion. No on-page intimacy — for most of this book they cannot touch at all, and that is entirely the point.