The Tangle And Oldest Trace

Some objects carry more than memory.Halla Aldgate can read them. Two years into running her great-aunt Juno's residue practice on the winding, overhang-shadowed lane called the Tangle, she has learned to sit with an object and feel what it holds - grief, resentment, love, the particular weight of something unfinished. She is good at this. She knows which floorboard creaks, which blend of tea Oswin will leave outside her door on difficult mornings, which chair is hers. She belongs here, completely. She knows that.What she doesn't yet know is what it cost Juno to build it.As autumn draws the lane inward and Halla works through the last cases in the wooden box Juno left her, something begins to surface in the residue - a familiar signature she doesn't recognise. A practitioner, young and uncertain, who attempted something across multiple objects and stopped each time at the same threshold. The signature sharpens as more cases are opened. Then a walk-in client arrives with an object whose history connects everything, and the question Halla has been quietly assembling becomes one she can no longer file and move on from.Because the early practitioner is Juno. And the failure Juno carried quietly for decades - the one she never passed to another practitioner, never wrote the letter for, kept moving to the bottom of the box as new cases came in - is waiting at the very bottom still.The Tangle and the Oldest Trace is the third novel in the Tangle series: a quiet, precise, deeply felt cozy fantasy about what it means to truly know someone - and what that knowledge asks of you. Halla doesn't need to find her place. She needs to understand, fully and finally, what was placed in her hands, and by whom, and why.For readers of Becky Chambers, Heather Fawcett, and Travis Baldree, and for anyone who has ever inherited something that turned out to be a conversation.The Tangle and the Oldest Trace is the third book in the Tangle series. Books one and two can be read first for the fullest experience, though this novel stands on its own. The wooden box has one case left. Pick it up and find out what's inside.

Pages: 243, Paperback, Independently published