In the StoryThe Collection
Paris, 1882. Before anyone can understand the impossible, its witnesses must be kept from disappearing. Letters, séances, unsettling accounts pass through the hands of people trying to distinguish trickery from what resists explanation. But preservation means more than stacking documents. A family wants an artifact withdrawn. A name puts someone at risk. Evidence already has a price.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
Across the table, the notary continued reading the inventory as though he had heard nothing. The room smelled of cold coal, leather, and dust disturbed after years of stillness. For eight days, Dr. Théodore Dervieux’s cabinets had been emptied in layers: medical treatises into numbered crates, scholarly correspondence into blue boxes, invoices and accounts into beige folders. Against the back wall remained the boxes without a destination.Read the excerpt ↗