For readers who love slow-burn mystery, gothic atmosphere, and unreliable narrators The dead don't steal. They trade. Every Samhain, Isolde "Izzy" Vela leaves the same offerings on her family's graves: mezcal, rosemary, a cigarette, and a letter she never sends. She knows the rules-never ask for more than one secret, never read the book aloud, never check the graves at dawn-but this year, the dead are greedy. The offerings vanish before midnight. The Book of Given Names writes itself in her ancestors' handwriting, its pages filled with confessions that rewrite her memories. And the black…mehr
For readers who love slow-burn mystery, gothic atmosphere, and unreliable narrators The dead don't steal. They trade. Every Samhain, Isolde "Izzy" Vela leaves the same offerings on her family's graves: mezcal, rosemary, a cigarette, and a letter she never sends. She knows the rules-never ask for more than one secret, never read the book aloud, never check the graves at dawn-but this year, the dead are greedy. The offerings vanish before midnight. The Book of Given Names writes itself in her ancestors' handwriting, its pages filled with confessions that rewrite her memories. And the black marigolds on Luz's grave bloom only for those who don't know they're dead. When a skeptical journalist, Dante Morales, arrives to expose the town's "haunted" tourism scams, he catches Izzy pulling a locket from her sister's sealed casket. But the real fraud isn't the graves-it's the lie Izzy tells herself to keep breathing. Because the Collector is coming for the last piece of her: the name she buried herself under. Now, with the book's ink bleeding into her veins and the tide pools whispering in a language only she understands, Izzy must decide: Is she the girl who drowned, the ghost who got away, or the monster the dead made her? A haunting, lyrical tale of memory as currency, grief as a bargain, and the lies we tell to stay alive-even when we're not.
I'm Christina Whisler, and I write the kind of stories that cling to you like salt on your skin after a storm-stories where the dead don't stay buried and the living can't outrun their hungers. What the Dead Keep, the first book in The Graves That Answer Back series, is my love letter to the ghosts we carry, the lies we tell ourselves, and the bargains we make in the dark when no one's watching. I've always been a collector of silences-the kind that hum between headstones, the kind that curl around a half-empty glass of mezcal, the kind that press against your ribs when you're standing too close to the edge of something. My prose is built from those quiet moments, the ones where the air tastes like copper and the past won't stay dead. I write for the women who've been called too much and the men who've been called not enough. For the ones who know what it's like to stand in a graveyard at midnight and wonder if the wind is whispering their name-or their sins. When I'm not writing, you'll find me in the liminal spaces: the hours between dusk and dark, the stretch of highway where the radio cuts to static, the tide pools that reflect something that isn't you. I live in a house that settles with a sigh, where the walls remember things I don't, and I surround myself with the tools of my trade-black coffee, dog-eared tarot decks, and the kind of silence that isn't empty. It's waiting. What the Dead Keep isn't just a story. It's an invitation, a dare. The dead are always listening. The question is-are you brave enough to hear what they say?
Es gelten unsere Allgemeinen Geschäftsbedingungen: www.buecher.de/agb
Impressum
www.buecher.de ist ein Internetauftritt der buecher.de internetstores GmbH
Geschäftsführung: Monica Sawhney | Roland Kölbl | Günter Hilger
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Batheyer Straße 115 - 117, 58099 Hagen
Postanschrift: Bürgermeister-Wegele-Str. 12, 86167 Augsburg
Amtsgericht Hagen HRB 13257
Steuernummer: 321/5800/1497
USt-IdNr: DE450055826