Keeper of the Bees

by Meg Kassel

Published 1 October 2018
KEEPER OF THE BEES is a tale of two people who are both beautiful and beastly, and whose pasts are entangled in surprising and heartbreaking ways.

Dresden is cursed. He houses a hive of bees in his chest, which he can’t stop from stinging people with psychosis-inducing venom. He has been this way for centuries - since he was eighteen and magic flowed through his homeland, corrupting its people.

He follows a troupe of harbingers of death to a Midwest town marked for impending disaster. There, he encounters Essie, a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from debilitating delusions and hallucinations. His bees want to sting her on sight, but Essie doesn’t see a monster when she looks at Dresden, prompting him to hold back his bees and spare her. What starts out as a simple act of mercy ends up unraveling Dresden’s solitary life and Essie’s tormented one. An impossible romance blooms, even as Essie is pulled into a murder investigation and Dresden embarks on a desperate quest to unravel a centuries-old curse.

Black Bird of the Gallows

by Meg Kassel

Published 5 September 2017
A simple but forgotten truth: Where harbingers of death appear, the morgues will soon be full. Harbingers settle in places where tragedy is about to strike, then feed on the energy of the dying. Then, they leave. Off to the next doomed place. No one wants a family of harbingers of death as neighbors, but that’s exactly what seventeen-year-old Angie Dovage gets when Reece Fernandez moves in next door.

Angie knows the mysterious boy is more than he appears, but can’t imagine that his presence heralds a massive tragedy that will soon devastate the region. She has more to worry about than Reece’s inevitable departure, because where harbingers of death go, the Beekeepers follow. Their sting turns sane people crazy, kind people into killers. Where Beekeepers go, people die. Quite horribly, in fact. Their love of chaos makes a disaster that much harder to survive, and they are stinging at will, causing a sudden epidemic of violence in her quiet mining town.

Angie wants to protect everyone she cares about, but stopping the Beekeepers involves a choice that will claim her life or Reece’s soul. She’s about to learn the price of both.