The Ninth Choir

The Ninth Choir is the story of a five-hundred-year-old elemental witch with a foul temper, a retired priest who lost his God in a Chicago street when he was eleven and has been looking for him ever since, a teenage Archangel who can burst two men into a fine red mist when the situation requires it, and a Creator who has managed the emergence of mankind on 101,403 planets and is still not entirely certain this one is going to make it. It is also the story of the Whisperers — the creatures of the Ninth Order who have been going to people in their worst moments since before recorded history. They sit with the dying. They walk with the grieving. They find the person about to make an irreversible decision and whisper something true into the space between the choice and the moment. They remember nothing afterward. They cannot tell anyone what they are. They have been doing this work scattered across the world, each believing they are the only one of their kind.They are not alone. There are thousands of them.And someone is killing them.The Old Man — an ancient adversary of the Third Order — has spent fifty years cultivating the institutions of organized religion as instruments of elimination, building a machinery of zealotry so patient and so thorough that the Creator herself must bend the laws of creation to stop it. She cannot act directly. But she knows someone who can. A five-hundred-year-old elemental witch named Miriam, who has spent most of her existence in the service of a creature she feared, and who has only recently understood what she actually is.In the middle of all of it, Miriam walks past a young woman in a pub on an ordinary evening. Their fingers brush. Something that has been sealed for five hundred years opens a crack and never closes again.The Ninth Choir is a book about faith that survives everything that tries to kill it, about creatures who have been alone so long they have forgotten what it feels like not to be, and about what happens when the most powerful thing walking the Earth discovers, rather late, that love was the point all along.But more than anything, it is a love story between a 500-year-old witch and a twenty-something Whisperer who thinks she might be an angel.There are no angels in this book. But if there were, they would be exactly this.The Ninth Choir is the first book in a series. Read more