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The Rooster Crows at Midnight: The Bureau of Imaginary Problems 3
Paperback
Series: The Bureau of Imaginary Problems, Book 3
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 22 2026
Pages: 504
Weight: 1.47
Height: 1.01 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Bureau of Imaginary Problems does not officially exist.
Unofficially, it is overworked, underfunded, morally compromised, and still the closest thing reality has to a janitorial service with guns.
Former journalist Mara Quill is now a Bureau field agent, which means her job involves cryptids, cursed infrastructure, impossible paperwork, and asking inconvenient questions while things with teeth object. When the rural town of Black Hollow begins experiencing a miraculous run of good luck-lottery wins, impossible survivals, sudden healings, and one suspiciously victorious raccoon-the case looks almost wholesome.
That is the first warning sign.
The luck is not luck at all. It is debt. Every miracle in Black Hollow is being paid for somewhere else, by someone else, and the bill is coming due.
Soon Mara and her team are pulled into an escalating artifact economy moving through the reopened mythic corridor network: lucky pennies that steal outcomes, a silver mask that offers escape at the price of identity, a lantern that reveals truth without mercy, and a knife that can revise reality into a cleaner, kinder lie.
Alongside her are Rook, a blunt tactical agent whose preferred question is whether something can be shot; Tabs Mercer, a brilliant pattern analyst haunted by a misclassified disaster in Milwaukee; Kevin, who is Mothman and would appreciate everyone being precise about that; Crowley, the Bureau's exhausted Head of Legal; and a rooster who is not a god, not an omen, not a familiar, and absolutely not irrelevant.
As the case spirals from backroads West Virginia to hidden markets, impossible archives, vanished train platforms, and the Bureau's own classified SCIF, Mara discovers the true enemy is not simply selling miracles.
It is selling better endings.
And better endings are dangerous when they erase who paid for the first one.
Darkly funny, strange, heartfelt, and packed with bureaucratic absurdity, The Rooster Crows at Midnight is a supernatural adventure about luck, memory, identity, truth, revision, and the stupid details that prove what really happened.
Because sometimes the only thing standing between reality and a cleaner lie is a field report, a haunted coffee machine, a green card marked MAYBE, and one deeply uncooperative rooster.
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