I am a living ghost, a wanderer in search of my purpose and place...
Iâm a cemetery restorer by trade, but my calling has evolved from that of ghost seer to death walker to detective of lost souls. I solve the riddles of the dead so the dead will leave me alone.
Iâve come to Seven Gates Cemetery nursing a broken heart, but peace is hard to come by...for the ghosts here and for me. When the body of a young woman is discovered in a caged grave, I know that Iâve been summoned for a reason. Only I can unmask her killer. I want to trust the detective assigned to the case for he is a ghost seer like me. But how can I put my faith in anyone when supernatural forces are manipulating my every thought? When reality is ever-changing? And when the one person I thought I could trust above all others has turned into a diabolical stranger?
Praise for THE GRAVEYARD QUEEN series by Amanda Stevens
âThe beginning of Stevensâ GRAVEYARD QUEEN series left this reviewer breathless. The author smoothly establishes characters and forms the foundation of future storylines with an edgy and beautiful writing style. Her story is full of twists and turns, with delicious and surprising conclusions. Readers will want to force themselves to slow down and enjoy the book instead of speeding through to the end, and theyâll anxiously await the next installment of this deceptively gritty series.â
âRT Book Reviews on The Restorer
âThe Restorer is by turns creepy and disturbing, mixed with mystery and a bit of romance. Amelia is a strong character who has led a hard andâof necessityâsecret life. She is not close to many people, and her feelings for Devlin disturb her greatly. Although at times unnerving, The Restorer is well written and intriguing, and an excellent beginning to a new series.â
âMisti Pyles, Fort Worth Examiner
âI could rhapsodize for hours about how much I enjoyed
The Restorer. Amanda Stevens has woven a web of intricate plot lines that elicit many emotions from her readers. This is a scary, provocative, chilling and totally mesmerizing book. I never wanted it to end and Iâm going to be on pins and needles until the next book in THE GRAVEYARD QUEEN series comes out.â
âFresh Fiction
One
The caged grave was an anomaly in Beaufort County. In all my cemetery travels, Iâd come across only a handful of mortsafes, all of them in Europe. They were a Scottish invention, cleverly devised and manufactured in the early nineteenth century as a means of thwarting the nefarious grave robbers who dug up fresh human remains for profit.
But body snatching wasnât a modern-day concern, and from what I could see through the tall grass, the cage didnât appear that old. No more than two or three decades, if that. The heavy iron grates had rusted in the salt air, but the rods and plates were still intact and I could see the dull gleam of a steel padlock on the gate.
My pulse quickened as I made my way along the overgrown pathway. It wasnât every day I stumbled across such a fascinating find. Although stumbled was perhaps a misnomer because Iâd been drawn to that desolate spot for a reason. Lured from my work in Seven Gates Cemetery by a presence as yet unknown to me.
For the past several months, Iâd been working in a small graveyard that was located near the ruins of an old church in Ascension, South Carolina. Until now, there had been nothing unusual about the restoration. I gathered trash, cleaned headstones and chopped away overgrowth until sunset, and then I went home to a cool shower, a solitary dinner and an early bedtime.
It had become a welcome routine. Even my nights had been uneventful and mostly dreamless. The dog days of summer left me so drained that I slept the sleep of the dead as the Lowcountry sweltered in the August heat. The small air conditioner in my rental provided only the barest relief and so Iâd taken to sleeping in the hammock on the screened porch. There was something intrinsically soothing about the sea breezes that swept in from the islands and the songbirds that serenaded me from the orange grove.
Here in this coastal oasis, Charleston seemed a million miles away and so did John Devlin. I told myself thatâs what I wanted. After the events that had unfolded over a year ago in Kroll Cemetery, the gulf between us had widened until Iâd felt I had no choice but to give Devlin the space he seemed to need.
His leave from the Charleston Police Department had turned into a permanent resignation, and the last Iâd heard he was working for his grandfather, a situation I couldnât have imagined a year ago. A lot of things had happened that I could never have imagined, not the least of which were the changes Iâd undergone. The one constant, however, was the ache in my heart. After all this time, Devlinâs absence from my life still pained me.