The Thirteenth Gate
Dominion Mysteries
by Kat Ross
Date of
Publication: June 26th 2017
Publisher:
Acorn
Cover
Artist: Damonza
Genre:
Fantasy/Mystery
BLURB
Winter 1888. At an asylum in the
English countryside, a man suspected of being Jack the Ripper kills an orderly
and flees into the rain-soaked night. His distraught keepers summon the Lady
Vivienne Cumberland—who's interviewed their patient and isn't sure he's a man
at all. An enigmatic woman who guards her own secrets closely, Lady Vivienne
knows a creature from the underworld when she sees one. And he’s the most
dangerous she's ever encountered.
As Jack rampages through London,
Lady Vivienne begins to suspect what he's searching for. And if he finds it,
the doors to purgatory will be thrown wide open…
Across the Atlantic, an
archaeologist is brutally murdered after a Christmas Eve gala at the American
Museum of Natural History. Certain peculiar aspects of the crime attract the
interest of the Society for Psychical Research and its newest investigator, Harrison
Fearing Pell. Is Dr. Sabelline's death related to his recent dig in Alexandria?
Or is the motive something darker?
As Harry uncovers troubling
connections to a serial murder case she’d believed was definitively solved, two
mysteries converge amid the grit and glamor of Gilded Age New York. Harry and
Lady Vivienne must join forces to stop an ancient evil. The key is something
called the Thirteenth Gate. But where is it? And more importantly, who will
find it first?
Buy Link: Amazon
The
Greymoor Lunatic Asylum made a grim impression even in daylight. It crouched at
the end of a long, treeless drive, barred windows gleaming beneath a peaked
slate roof. After her first interview with Dr. William Clarence, Lady Vivienne
Cumberland had taken a hard look at those bars. She’d strongly suggested to the
asylum superintendent that he move Dr. Clarence to a room with no window at all.
That had
been just over a month ago. Now, in the darkest hour of the night, with rain
coursing down the brick façade and thunder rattling the turrets, Greymoor
looked like something torn from the pages of a penny dreadful, hulking and
shadowed despite the lamps burning in every window. At the wrought-iron front
gate, a black brougham drew to a halt. Following a brief exchange with the
occupants, two officers from the Essex constabulary waved it through,
immediately ducking back into the shelter of a police wagon.
“I told
them to watch him,” Lady Cumberland muttered, yanking her gloves on. “To keep
him isolated from the staff and other patients. Clearly, they didn’t listen.
The fools.”
Alec
Lawrence gripped the cane resting across his knees. He had been present at the
interview, had looked into Dr. Clarence’s eyes, a blue so pale they reminded
him of a Siberian dog. The memory unsettled him still, and he wasn’t a man who
was easily shaken.
“We don’t
know what happened yet,” he pointed out. “Superintendent Barrett can hardly be
faulted considering we withheld certain information. I rather doubt he would
have believed us anyway.”
Vivienne
scowled. “You may be right, but it was only a matter of time. I’ve known that
since the day Clarence was brought here. The S.P.R. made a very bad mistake
entrusting him to Greymoor.”
“We still
don’t know for sure—”
“Yes, we
do. The killings stopped, didn’t they?”
“That
could be for any number of reasons,” he said stubbornly.
“Including
that the creature who committed them is behind bars. Or was, at least.”
Alec
Lawrence buttoned his woolen greatcoat. This was not a new debate. “Perhaps.
But there’s not a scrap of hard evidence against him. Nothing but a single
reference in a report by some American girl and Clarence’s own odd demeanor.
Had there been more, he would have been locked up tight in Newgate Prison.”
Vivienne
turned her obsidian gaze on him. With her high cheekbones and full lips, she
might have been thirty, or a decade in either direction. Only Alec and a
handful of others knew better.
“That
American girl is Arthur Conan Doyle’s goddaughter and she seemed quite clever
to me. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” she added quietly. “Walls don’t hold
Dr. Clarence’s sort for long.”
“Look,”
he said, softening. “For what it’s worth, I think we did the right thing taking
him off the streets. I just....” He trailed off, unsure how he meant to finish
the thought.
“You
don’t trust my judgment anymore. Since Harper Dods.”
“That’s
not even remotely true. I simply think we need to keep open minds on the
matter. The signs aren’t there, Vivienne. I’m the first to admit Dr. Clarence
is an odd duck, perhaps worse. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t human.”
Vivienne
arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “And yet here we are, summoned by Sidgwick
in the middle of the night. I wonder if he’s regretting his decision?”
The note
from Henry Sidgwick, president of the Society for Psychical Research, had
arrived in the form of a small, bedraggled messenger boy pounding on Lady
Vivienne’s front door in St. James an hour before. It was both vague and
ominous, citing an “unfortunate incident” involving Dr. Clarence and urging all
due haste to the asylum.
“I
suppose we’ll find out in a minute,” Alec said, turning his collar up. He
swiped a hand through chestnut hair and jammed a top hat on his head. “Off to
the races.”
A gust of
rain shook the carriage as it slowed at the front entrance. A six-story tower
capped by a Roman clock and white spire anchored two wings extending on either
side. Unlike most asylums, which had separate annexes for men and women,
Greymoor’s residents were all male. The north wing housed those poor souls
suffering from garden-variety disorders like dementia and melancholia. The
other was reserved for the so-called “incurables,” a euphemism for the
criminally insane. Violent, unpredictable men deemed unfit for prison.
Despite
his doubts, Alec Lawrence would have happily had the lot of them over for tea
rather than spend five minutes in the company of Dr. William Clarence. In his
heart, he wondered if Vivienne’s instincts were correct. But he wanted her to
be wrong because the alternative was far worse.
Buy Link: Amazon
Author Info
Kat Ross worked as a journalist
at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she
likes best: making stuff up. She's the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine
Day, the Fourth Element fantasy series (The Midnight Sea, Blood of the Prophet,
Queen of Chaos), and the new Dominion Mysteries. She loves myths, monsters and
doomsday scenarios.
MY INTERVIEW WITH KAT
ROSS
How
would you describe your style of writing to someone that has never read your
work?
Thanks
so much for having me on the blog today! I try to blend all the elements I
personally enjoy in fiction: suspense, humor, romance, a bit of darkness and
unpredictability, and characters that make you feel something, whether that’s
love, hate or some combination of the two. Although I do write epic fantasy set
in fairly complex worlds, I try to keep the pacing fast and avoid information
overload. I will put a book down without hesitation if there are too many
made-up names for things and characters and backstory in the first few pages,
though it’s amazing how many writers do that.
I write
in a few different genres, including historical fantasy/mystery—like The Thirteenth Gate—so the narrative voice
is different depending on the series and also the character POV. What you won’t
find in my stories are MCs who are drama queens, or hopefully any scenes that
are boring!
What
are some of your writing/publishing goals for this year?
I’m
trying to write faster and be less judgmental about first drafts. It’s hard
because I tend to be a perfectionist—even though I know it’s a bad habit to
polish too much as you write, the forward momentum is lost. I’m also trying to
loosen up a little about plotting. My outlines generally run into the thousands
of words, but I’m still almost always surprised by new characters or twists
that spontaneously appear in the act of actually writing the book. So I’m
experimenting with a much simpler outline and only getting really granular with
the 2-3 chapters I’m currently working on.
I do
have to know the very end before I begin. But I love that E.L. Doctorow quote: “[Writing
is] like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Do you
feel that writing is an ingrained process or just something that flows
naturally for you?
I can’t
even answer that as I veer so wildly between the words pouring out and feeling
like I’m extracting each one with a painful dental tool. This is on a daily,
even hourly basis. Even though I’ve written eight books and published six of
them, sadly, it doesn’t seem to get easier. I just show up each day and do the
best I can. And I know if I continue to do that, even if some days feel horrid
and unproductive, I will get to the end eventually.
Do you
have a character that you have been working on for a long time that still isn't
quite ready, but fills you with excitement to work on the story?
Oh yes!
I’m starting a new multi-book series, so I have a whole list of major and minor
characters who I’m just getting to know (alongside other characters I’ve already
written tens of thousands of words about). It’s no secret that villains are my
favorites so I’m really looking forward to writing the chapters with the Oracle
of Delphi, also known as The Pythia. She can work fire magic, and she’s not
nice at all, lol. But of course, every villain is also the hero of his or her own
story, so the Oracle isn’t just a one-dimensional mustache-twirler.
If you
could spend one-week with 5 fictional characters, who would they be?
Sherlock
Holmes and John Watson, of course!
Bartimaeus
the Djinn (The Bartimaeus Trilogy by
Jonathan Stroud). Smart, sarcastic, highly entertaining.
David
Wong (John Dies at the End, This Book is
Full of Spiders). If any of you have read those books, no explanation is
needed.
Haplo
from The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret
Weis and Tracy Hickman. He’s badass and covered with powerful rune tattoos and
I’ve always been more than half in love with him.
Where
would you spend one full year, if you could go ANYWhere? What would you do with
this time?
I absolutely
love traveling so there’s very few places I wouldn’t want to go, but New
Zealand is at the top of my list. Living in North America, it’s not the sort of
place you’d drop in for a long weekend. But a whole year? Hell yes. Ever since
the LoTR movies, I think we’ve all had a crush on Kiwiland.
Can you
share you next creative project(s)? If yes, can you give a few details?
My new
series is called The Fourth Talisman. It follows some of the characters from
The Fourth Element trilogy, but begins a whole new story arc in a new world
that’s locked to its star, so half is always in daylight and half in
darkness.
The
humans live on the sunlit side, and magical creatures called daevas on the
moonlit side. The story follows Nazafareen, who’s part mortal, part daeva. When
an assassin tries to kill her, she flees to Delphi, where she discovers that
the Oracle is not at all what she seems… Like the Fourth Element books, the
series will blend history and fantasy, in this case, the ancient Greeks and
Persians.
I’ll also
be writing more Dominion Mystery books, either later this year or early 2018.
All my series overlap, so readers can move between them and learn more about
their favorite characters at different times.
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