Ballad of the Bone Road

In the glittering city of Port Astor, where fae roads criss-cross human highways and ghosts whisper to the living, nothing is ever as it seems.

From Sunburst Award-winning author A. C. Wise, this utterly original dark fantasy tale of faith and fanaticism, doomed love and desperate bargains is perfect for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Ava Reid.

Port Astor is a city of ghosts. Once home to the beautiful, brutal courts of the fae, forty years ago they vanished without explanation - and Port Astor decided to forget.

Brix and Bellefeather are paranormal investigators, working to keep Port Astor’s wraiths and spectres from consuming the city. Both have hauntings of their own: Belle shares her body with a demon, Belizial; Brix has trapped the soul of his dead fiancée in the world of the living, unwilling to let her go.

While investigating the glamorous and notoriously haunted Peony Hotel, Brix and Belle come across a young couple tangled up in one of the city’s most infamous tales. Jimmy Valentine, silver screen idol and one-time favorite of a fae queen, has returned to haunt the Peony. But Jimmy is no mere ghost, and Brix and Belle soon realize his return is more intimately tied to their own hauntings than they could ever have imagined.

The fae have not forgotten that Port Astor once belonged to them. And their Hollow Queen won’t give up her kingdom so easily.

A.C. Wise is the author of Hooked and the bestselling Wendy, Darling. She also has two short story collections published by Lethe Press, Catfish Lullaby, a novella published by Broken Eye Books (2019), and The Ghost Sequences, a short story collection published by Undertow Books (2021), which was shortlisted for a 2021 Bram Stoker Award.

Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, as well as twice being a finalist for the Nebula Award, twice being a finalist for the Sunburst Award, and being a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes semi-regular review columns to The Book Smugglers and Apex Magazine. Originally from Canada, she now lives in Pennsylvania, US.

She tweets at @ac_wise.