The Thirteenth Chair

London. November, 1888. The Ripper is done with his work, and the city is learning to breathe again - badly.

In 13 separate corners of the city, a red envelope appears. Propped against a breakfast plate. Pressed into a gloved palm on a crowded omnibus. Slipped beneath a door by a hand no servant will admit to. Each envelope contains a single ivory card, printed in crimson:

You are invited to dine at Blackthorn House, 9 Vellum Lane, Whitechapel. Your presence is not merely requested. It is required.

Vellum Lane does not appear on any map. Blackthorn House should not exist. And their hostess - the devastating, absolute Madame Calvaire - is not a woman in any sense that the word can comfortably hold.

She is Death. Wearing flesh for one evening. Curious, as she always is, about the living.

13 guests take their seats. They do not know one another. They do not know, yet, why they have been chosen. They know only that the invitation came, that something in them answered it, and that only 1 of them will leave.

What they choose to do with the hours between the soup course and the dawn will determine which of them that is.

The Thirteenth Chair is a fever-lit, merciless, and strangely beautiful novel about guilt, the weight of the unconfessed, and the singular price of being - in the eyes of something eternal - genuinely interesting.

She has set 13 places. She needs only 12.