Claire Hensley wakes to rain, blood, and a dead man on her apartment floor.
She does not remember killing him.
She does not remember the hour before she opened her eyes.
All she has is a black book, a burning spiral mark on her arm, and the sickening certainty that whatever happened in the missing hour has already changed her life beyond repair. Afraid to call the police and unable to trust her own mind, Claire turns to her closest friend, Vicky, and begins pulling at the first threads of an impossible truth.
There are books that can remove pain.
They take the hour a person cannot bear to remember, the crash, the death, the failure, the moment that split a life in two. For a while, the victim feels free. Then the hollow ripens, and the thing inside the book comes back for more.
Claire has been marked by Book 7, one of the most dangerous grimoires ever kept by the fractured order known as the Keepers of the Aevum. As hunters, hosts, ledgers, and buried rituals close in around her, Claire is forced into an alliance with Marek, a man who has spent years burning the books and surviving what they leave behind. Their trail leads from Croft's Curiosities to Chicago, from private vaults to a dead lighthouse on the Oregon coast, and finally toward the Root, the first hunger beneath the books.
To survive, Claire must recover the truth of the missing hour without letting the book turn that truth into another wound it can feed from.
The Missing Hour is a dark supernatural horror novel about stolen memory, occult books, grief, guilt, and the terrible price of letting something ancient take your pain away.
