Flappers & Fiction

On a Sunday afternoon in 1886, a mining analyst named Baird found shattered Bohemian glassware on a cobwebbed shelf in a cabin near the abandoned Pennekawba mine. Scratched into the glass: “Z. Z. An. LXXI.” Months later, deep underground beside a rock pile that entombed dead miners, he pulled a moldy notebook from a buried jacket. The diary inside belonged to a German scientist who believed he could resurrect the dead. His final entry may surprise you.

When a wealthy admirer secretly leases the decaying Château St. Ferréol to save his beloved Countess from poverty, he expects only a solitary night in the Savoy mountains. But the ancient servants warn him of the Headsman’s Chamber, where a restless ancestor spends the darkness dragging heavy furniture across the floor. Determined to prove his mettle, our hero confronts the noisy spirit. What he uncovers behind the massive oak buffet reveals a centuries-old secret and perhaps the only key to winning the proud Countess’s hand.

In eastern Connecticut, Micah Rood tends his decaying homestead with a gentle hand, preferring the company of orchard swallows to his fellow men. His pride is a single tree bearing rare golden apples, the envy of every farmer in the district. But when a traveling peddler threatens to seize this paradise, a moment of blind rage stains the garden’s peace forever. Now, as the spring blossoms unfurl with a shocking, blood-red hue, Micah finds that the earth itself may be the most damning witness to his crime.

A girl of ten, dress torn, feet bare and freezing, asks a shoemaker no one will patronize to make her shoes on credit. He warms her cold feet in his hands before he measures them. That small kindness builds Bargoff’s trade in Kattin, but it also binds his fate to hers. Eight years later, when stolen goods appear in his closet and the village cries villain, his silence protects a secret only Sunny can reveal.

Dr. Zwingli Zschorer is a man who has conquered death itself, and the proof lies sleeping in the next room: his niece Babette, restored to life by an alkaloid called ichorine on the night of February 7, 1872. But when a Giessen newspaper brands him a quack, wounded pride drives him to prove his miracle a second time, before witnesses, using the same child. Will he achieve a second miracle or something far worse?

When chemist Baird unearths a decayed notebook in the depths of the Belle Marie mine, he drags his roommate Buchanan into a mystery that began years ago in Germany. As the two men piece together the fragments of a dark scientific experiment under the flickering oil lamps of Iron Mountain, a terrifying possibility emerges. The governess they both admire may be more than she seems. She might be the living proof of a miracle that defies death itself.