The Ouija Board Repair Girl

About this book:

Hester Finch doesn't do retail. She does resin, salt, and spiritual grounding—sixty bucks a pop to scrub the psychic residue off "vintage parlor novelties" before they drive another family's parakeet to self-plucking. Her workshop is a shed behind her uncle's house, her toolkit includes iron filings and dried hyssop alongside the linseed oil, and her clients pay in crumpled fifties and desperate silence. It's a living. Then a dredge boat captain drops a burlap-wrapped slab of Lebanon cedar on her bench: three thousand years old, sweating bitumen, carved with cuneiform instead of a Parker Brothers alphabet. Its planchette is baked clay with a hole worn glass-smooth by thumbs that turned to dust before the pyramids were middle-aged. And it doesn't wait for an invitation.

When Hester touches it, the board answers in a language that clicks like stones in a dry riverbed. The fluorescent tubes explode. Something knocks back from beneath the concrete floor. Now the board is breathing in her oil bath, the clay pointer aims itself at the sound like a compass needle, and the only rational explanation—a nineteenth-century sea captain's sunken curio cabinet—doesn't account for the voice rising from the grain, or the name it keeps spelling in wedge-shaped marks that burn like embers.

Armed with her grandmother's drawknives, a lead-lined drawer, and a healthy skepticism that's rapidly curdling into awe, Hester has forty-eight hours before the cedar dries out and splits—or before whatever has been waiting since the Fertile Crescent finishes waking up. *The Ouija Board Repair Girl* is a gritty, atmospheric supernatural mystery where woodworking meets the world's oldest ghost story, and the most dangerous tool in the shop isn't the belt sander. It's the girl who listens.