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In Vane
Hardcover
ISBN13: 9781636451985
Publisher: J. M. A. Quinn
Published: Oct 22 2026
Pages: 134
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some ladders you climb to escape.
Some you climb because the other man inside you has already built the rungs from bone.
In the neon-bleached corridors of Spire Brook, Detective Crist has spent his life reading the language of the dead. When three bodies surface-arranged with sacramental precision and marked by an ancient devotional called The Ladder of Necessary Suffering-Detective Crist realizes the killer's handwriting is eerily familiar. His own. The city's fog holds its breath. The neon cycles through pink, blue, and darkness. And in the apartment Crist no longer remembers entering, a wall maps the seven stages of dissolution, each photograph pinned with the care of a believer preparing an altar. The victims were penitent. They were contrite. They did not struggle. As if they trusted the hands that held them, they lay still.
Now the fourth stage waits. And the detective who once hunted monsters is no longer certain which side of the badge he stands on or whether the man who built the Ladder is the same one who must climb it to the end.
Penitence.
Contrition.
Mortification.
Surrender.
Oblation.
Silence.
Dissolution.
Seven words.
Seven deaths.
And only one soul left to split between them.
The last rung cannot be described by the living.
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