You can taste the salt and feel it crunching underfoot. Stretching for miles beneath the city, it’s a series of glittering caverns. The Detroit Salt Mine, which was closed down for a period of time, is another such magical place. In my stories as an adult, it became the burial ground for a dragon in Embers, haunted by a ghostly woman who keeps guard to make sure the dragon sleeps. No one really knows what it was used for, and I always wondered. The serpent coils over a preternaturally-silent meadow that smells like sunshine and fresh-cut grass. It’s the largest effigy mound in the U.S., shaped like a serpent swallowing an egg. When I was a child, I visited Serpent Mound with my grandfather. These places have their own magic, their own special gravity that pulls pieces of stories around them.

There are some places in the real world that have just stuck with me as I write, and have managed to work their way into my fictional worlds. We’ll be giving away three copies of Sparks. But Hope Solomon wants more–she’s collecting spirits, and in a frantic race against time, Anya will face down an evil adversary who threatens her fragile relationship with her lover, her beloved Sparky’s freshly-hatched newts, and the wandering souls of the entire city. Soon she’s unearthed a connection to a celebrity psychic who preys on Detroit’s poor, promising miracles for money. Along with her inseparable salamander familiar, Sparky, Anya has seen, and even survived, all manner of fiery hell–but her newest case sparks suspicions of a bizarre phenomenon that no one but her eccentric team of ghost hunters might believe: spontaneous human combustion.Īfter fire consumes the home of elderly Jasper Bernard, Anya is stunned to discover his remains– or, more precisely, the lack of them even the fiercest fires leave some trace of their victims–and she is sure this was no naturally-occurring blaze. WITHOUT A TRACE Anya Kalinczyk is the rarest type of psychic medium, a Lantern, who holds down a day job as an arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department–while working 24/7 to exterminate malicious spirits plaguing a city plagued by unemployment and despair. The second novel, Sparks, was recently released to rave reviews. Today, I am excited to welcome Laura Bickle, author of the fabulous new Anya Kalinczyk series.

Embers by Laura Bickle