The Collector's Ledger

Six weeks since the skyrocket. Six weeks since Imogen Whitfield turned sixteen and her grandfather's gift became hers — and then kept becoming more than she'd bargained for. Immie can read objects now. Touch a button from someone's coat and receive their whole worried life. Hold an old iron key and find herself in a lamplit room in Edinburgh, watching a man write in an enormous leather-bound ledger with the certainty of someone who has been doing this for a very long time. The Collectors have been doing this for seven hundred years. They take magical gifts from practitioners and record the takings: name, date, what was taken. Forty-seven souls are bound in the Edinburgh ledger. In a lane in Dublin, the founding document of their entire institution sits on a reading table — misread, since the fourteenth century, as permission for everything they've done. With her circle — Priya and her protocols, Monika and her gift for receiving what is freed, and Rosamund Vass, who has been waiting two years for someone to hear what she encoded into a folklore book on a Scottish train — Immie plans two operations. One to destroy the ledger. One to correct five hundred years of institutional misreading. The story of the Ledger moves from Perth to Edinburgh to Dublin and finally to the west coast of Ireland. It is a novel about what it means to fully focus on someone correctly. It is the second book in The Magician's Granddaughter series by Patrick Maher.