William T. Dove

New York, September, 1945

The sign on his office door reads,

Pierce Chandler & Assoc.
Private & Paranormal Investigations

It’s not his real name, but the fella he borrowed it from won’t mind. He was finished with it.

Magic and things that go bump in the night crawled back into the world nearly a hundred years ago when the island of Avalon appeared sudden-like thirty miles west of Belmullet, Ireland, in 1850, tearing the bottom clean out of a fishing trawler and sending the crew in lifeboats back home with stories that were written off as the ravings of men who’d been at sea for too long—or hitting the sauce too hard.

Archeologists slapped the moniker on the island after it popped out from behind the curtain for an encore, when they dug up the bones of old Roman forts and the ruins of a not-so-Roman castle, along with a rat’s nest of tunnels that crawled criss-cross under the island like veins on a corpse. Some of the history aces who went into those tunnels came back changed.

Some never came back.

In the spring of 1942, the magic found Pierce and Brand in the Fort de Villey-le-Sec tunnels under France. It gave them both unique gifts, as it did for the other three members of Pierce Chandler & Associates.

Pierce Chandler, the Big Apple’s top private investigator, along with his protégé and assistant, the psychic Zachary ‘Zee’ Bernstein, solves crimes for high-end clients while dodging the Mob and a chorus line of nightmare creatures that go bump in the night. Pierce and Zee are joined in their investigations by the prickly but gorgeous Miss Isyphenia ‘Icy’ Teapenney, a gifted forensic mage, and Miss Evelyn Harrow, a medium who’s been jawing with the dead since the day she was born. And of course, Father Brandon O’Neil, New York State’s top exorcist, who believes in opening his argument with a blast from his 1897 Winchester trench gun. If that doesn’t work, he’ll call down holy wrath on anything evil that lurks in the darkness.

Coming April 2026