Only a few months have passed since the day Kester Lanner forced an angry ghost through the spirit door, but business prospects for Dr. Ribero’s supernatural agency haven’t improved. Things are looking grim when the agency lands a contract that they must share with a rival agency headed by Dr. Ribero’s sworn enemy, Larry Higgins. Desperate for the job, the team accepts and begins to investigate the seaside town of Lyme Regis, where elderly victims are dying.

The same mysterious clue links the horrendous deaths: the victims all see a double of themselves before dying. The teams wonder if they are dealing with a rogue doppelganger, one that isn’t content just predicting deaths but wants to carry them out as well. The victims’ connection to an ancient grave site leads to speculation that they may have disturbed a spirit more powerful than the two agencies can handle.

Kester Lanner didn’t know what he was getting into when he followed his mother’s dying request to contact the mysterious Dr. Ribero. Kester’s youthful surety of the world is shaken as he learns the secrets his mother took great care to keep. Meeting Dr. Ribero reveals a side of his mother he never even guessed existed, for Ribero is his long lost father, and soon Kester is thrown headlong into the family business: catching supernatural spirits. A logically-minded academic type, Kester is frightened by the sudden plunge into an unknown and dangerous world. He’s intrigued, despite his fear, as he reads an old diary that tells the chilling tale of the portrait of a beautiful woman, which is the home of an old and malevolent spirit. She’s a cunning spirit, and she just might be more than Dr. Ribero’s agency can handle. Kester soon becomes enmeshed in a struggle with a ghost so powerful and haunting that his first real case with the family business might just be his last.

Still recovering from the case of a serial-killer spirit in Lyme-Regis, Dr. Ribero’s agency is soon confronted with an even greater threat: a reckless cult conspiring with an ancient and powerful Daemon to open a permanent spirit door so that spirits will have unfettered access to the human realm. Having just witnessed the lethal consequences uncontrolled spirits can have on the unsuspecting, the agency joins forces with several others to prevent the cult from unleashing chaos and ending the world’s fragile protection from dangerous spirits.

Kester and Ribero’s team of inept supernatural investigators are back again. But this time, the stakes have been raised. Hrschni, a powerful daemon, together with the rest of the Thelemites, are hellbent on bringing spirits back to the world of the humans…at any cost. Kester needs to gain control of his unique abilities while coming to terms with the fact that his mother had more secrets than he realized. He must also decide where his allegiances really lie. As the twisted truths keep coming out, he finds it increasingly hard to know who to trust.

London, 2017. A long-dead ghost–nameless, all but formless, trapped beyond both the living and the afterlife–drifts through time in search of himself. What happened to him? To the love of his life? His memories slip away like the tide, tantalizingly close but always receding.

His lost world of steam, family, and horrific tragedy comes to him in flickers and gasps. But decades–the steam age, the war years, the age of counterculture–soon melt and disappear, consumed by a strange, hungry world of electricity and isolation.

As more of him slips away each day, this nameless ghost is shepherded by a fellow spirit, his sole companion in our foreign reality–a circus fortune teller tethered to him by a tragic history of her own.

Eerie and atmospheric, The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller unveils a mystery written in the gaps of memory. With insight and daring, Lucy Banks probes the deepest fears of our age on memory, mortality, and what it means to be human. Echoing the haunting voices of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, Banks conjures the longing that comes over us in our lonely moments, when we shiver and feel the presence of someone near us in the dark.