Charlatan

Isabelle Grove brings secrets to Seattle. Her fortune-telling grandfather trained her from youth as a false psychic medium, able to trick people into believing she can communicate with their dear departed. Isabelle’s business flourishes, but she is haunted by her lies. Then, Isabelle is approached by enigmatic Byron Grace, who claims to be a true medium, capable of unlocking her latent psychic power. The longings of Isabelle’s childhood rise again, from the time before she realized her grandfather was a charlatan, when she thought she was heir to his gifts. Byron offers Isabelle a chance to be what she always dreamed, but she learns that he, too, has been keeping secrets: his parents knew and worked with her grandfather. More, Byron knows that her grandfather does have the power to speak to the dead. A power he walked away from years ago, for reasons that neither he nor Byron will disclose. Furious at her grandfather’s lies, Isabelle takes Byron’s offer, and undergoes the horrifying transformation that unlocks her ability to speak to the dead. But when she does so, she finds, not the beneficent spirits of those departed, but a world of vicious wraiths that seem to be connected to the disappearance of human specters. Trapped with her burgeoning gift, Isabelle relies on Byron: staying in his palatial home; listening to his advice; surrounded by his friends, until she is entirely under his control. With her contacts to the outside world severed, Isabelle begins to wonder how the ravenous specters she sees are connected to Byron and the disappearances of the spirits he contacts. He has proven himself capable of duplicity and manipulation, but is he to blame for the death of hundreds of souls? And in the end, is he Isabelle’s protector...or her greatest threat?

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