… Inga Henriksen must make a journey. She must return to 1986, the summer she turned fourteen. She knows if you want to change the future, you must first rescue the past. She knows a great wrong which must be made right …
When Inga and Pete lose their parents to a tragic accident, they go to live on their grandparents’ hog farm in Sanpete County, Utah. There, Inga’s grandmother teaches her an ancient tradition of folk magic which has been in her family for over a thousand years, passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation. It is a magic made of history and family and Pagan Gods, and a prophetic vision of a Viking funeral, a fire upon the waters of Yuba Lake. But the summer of 1986, the summer Inga turns fourteen, her grandmother wanders into a storm that will forever change the lives of everyone in her family.
In the aftermath, Inga struggles to reconcile with what Grandma called “the deep magic.” She is haunted by Grandma’s vision of a Viking funeral, convinced it is her responsibility to bury Grandma in a ship on a lake. As a plague of locusts descends upon the valley to destroy her family farm, Inga and Pete embark on an adventure to right a great wrong. The quest will challenge them every step of the way. They will fail and keep fighting and fail again. A boy will become a warrior. A girl will become a magician. Children will be turned into adults. Sacrifices will be required. Before Inga can become the master of her destiny, she must first become the victim of history. Inga will learn what the Gods have always known. The greatest magic is not spells or rituals or chanted words. The greatest magic is not even love.
Set against the stark high desert of central Utah, featuring an eclectic cast of off-beat characters and a landscape shot through with gods and demons, Locust Eaters is a coming-of-age adventure about tradition, faith, and family, in which the modern world crumbles under the weight of the myths that created it, and Inga must rescue the child she used to be in order to heal the adult she has become.
The Chemical Marriage series is a seven novel septet, beginning with The Crow’s Head.
Master counterfeiter, Damian Lancaster, has one goal: get rich and retire by his thirtieth birthday. But when a routine drop goes wrong, Damian is rescued from gangsters by Nathalie Jevali, the woman who has haunted his nightmares all his life.
And she has dreamed of him as well.
Plunged into a mysterious world of occultists, alchemists, magicians, and scholars, pursued by international criminals, Damian and Nathalie must learn to trust each other if they hope to solve the mystery that unites them. Their only clues are an obscure fifteenth century wedding invitation, their shared recurring dreams and two words: Lapis exillis. A code name for the philosopher’s stone.
Adrian Stumpp 