Hail the Curtainbreaker

Sharlo Vane wakes in Kandelburg with two lives in his head and a detective agency he can barely keep afloat. In this city, the sun must be lit each morning, forgotten gods still answer prayers, and strange powers force people to follow invisible scripts.

When a desperate woman asks him to investigate a fiancé who remembers loving her but can no longer feel it, Sharlo discovers amber stage directions hanging above people’s heads. Everyone has a role. Everyone has an ending. Everyone—except him.

Armed with nothing but an improviser’s instinct, Sharlo is drawn into the Vesper Bureau, partnered with the sleepless Duskwarden Viola Raven, and set against a cult determined to reenact the deaths of seventeen gods.

Each case is another act, each borrowed power carries a fatal fate, and somewhere beyond the lights, an unseen audience is waiting for the curtain to fall.