The Diviners

Set in New York City in 1926, The Diviners opens at a Manhattan party where teenage socialites use a Ouija board and summon a spirit calling itself "Naughty John," who delivers threatening messages about "the Beast." The hostess fails to properly close the séance. Across the city, in the cellar of a ruined mansion on the Upper West Side, something ancient stirs to life.

Seventeen-year-old Evie O'Neill is banished from Zenith, Ohio, after publicly accusing the town golden boy of impregnating a chambermaid. Evie divined this secret by holding his class ring: She possesses the ability to read an object's history through touch, but revealing this power would expose her as something she has no name for. Her parents send her to live with her Uncle Will, curator of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult in Manhattan. Around her neck she wears a half-dollar coin, a birthday gift from her brother James, who was killed in the Great War on the day he sent it.

In New York, Evie settles into the Bennington, a faded apartment building where she reunites with her pen pal, Mabel Rose, and meets Jericho Jones, Will's quiet eighteen-year-old assistant and ward. She befriends Theta Knight, a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl who lives with her best friend, Henry DuBois, an aspiring songwriter. Evie also tangles with Sam Lloyd, a charming pickpocket who steals her money; Will later hires Sam at the museum.

In Harlem, seventeen-year-old Memphis Campbell runs numbers, collecting bets in an illegal lottery for the crime boss Papa Charles, while secretly writing poetry. He cares for his younger brother, Isaiah, at their Aunt Octavia's apartment. Memphis is haunted by a recurring dream of a crossroads, a dust storm, and a mysterious symbol: an eye with a lightning bolt. He once healed through touch but lost the ability when he failed to save his dying mother. Isaiah speaks in his sleep, echoing the same ominous phrases the Ouija board spelled out.

The central mystery begins when Ruta Badowski, a young Polish-American woman, is lured to the ruined mansion by a man calling himself Mr. Hobbes, who performs a ritual murder and removes her eyes. Detective Terrence Malloy asks Will to consult on the case. At the crime scene, Evie sees a pentacle, an inverted five-pointed star encircled by a snake, branded on the body, the word HARLOT on the forehead, and a cryptic religious note. When she touches the dead girl's shoe buckle, she receives horrifying visions, including a distinctive whistling tune.

Will investigates the occult dimensions of the case. Evie discovers the pentacle belongs to the Brethren, a vanished religious cult from upstate New York. A second victim, twelve-year-old Tommy Duffy, is killed with his hands taken. A colleague of Will's identifies the murders as following the Book of the Brethren, a text prescribing eleven ritual offerings to manifest the Beast on earth. The cult burned to death in 1848 at their leader Pastor Algoode's command, and the book's last page, which contains a spell to destroy the Beast, has been torn out. The ritual must be completed by Solomon's Comet, which passes every fifty years and is now less than two weeks away.

A third victim, the Mason Eugene Meriwether, is found murdered in the Grand Masonic Lodge. Evie reads his ring and again hears the whistling. Detective Malloy identifies the tune as a children's song about Naughty John Hobbes, a historical grave robber and killer hanged nearly fifty years earlier. Evie discovers that Hobbes reinvented himself as a fraudulent medium at Knowles' End, the very mansion from the opening chapter; police found ten bodies in the basement. Similar murders occurred fifty years earlier, when the comet last appeared.

When Will threatens to send Evie home after a speakeasy arrest, she demonstrates her power on his glove. He believes her but warns that people with such gifts, historically called Diviners, have been persecuted. Jacob Call, a follower of the Brethren, confesses to the murders, but Evie determines he is a false confessor.

Memphis and Theta meet at a Harlem nightclub and discover they share the same recurring dream. They begin a romance. Gabriel Johnson, Memphis's best friend and a gifted trumpet player, is murdered, fulfilling the eighth offering. Memphis is devastated, particularly because Isaiah had warned Gabe of danger. Memphis gives Evie Gabe's lucky rabbit's foot, and she performs a deep reading, identifying the killer as John Hobbes from a fifty-year-old photograph.

Will accepts the impossible: The killer is the ghost of John Hobbes, who ingests body parts to become more corporeal. They visit Mary White Blodgett, Hobbes's elderly former companion, who reveals Hobbes was born Yohanan Hobbeson Algoode, the son of the Brethren's leader and the cult's sole survivor. Evie steals Hobbes's ring and performs a dangerous reading, witnessing his brutal childhood and the cult's founding atrocity: Pastor Algoode had the young John burn the faithful alive as the first offering. She recovers the missing incantation. At the vision's end, the boy Hobbes looks at her and says, "I see you."

Will, Evie, and Jericho exhume Hobbes's corpse in the Catskills and retrieve the pentacle pendant, believing it anchors his spirit. New Brethren faithful attack them. Evie ignites the corpse, and they flee, but Jericho is shot. At their inn, Will administers a mysterious blue serum, and Evie discovers machinery beneath Jericho's wound. Jericho confides that after infantile paralysis left his body failing, he was selected for Daedalus, a secret military program that merged human bodies with machines; only he survived.

Mary White is murdered, and a forged note frames Will. Will and Sam are arrested. The pendant crumbles to ash, and Evie realizes Hobbes's power resides in a hidden chamber within Knowles' End, its walls inscribed with the offerings. She and the weakened Jericho race to the mansion as the comet nears midnight. The house traps them; Jericho is incapacitated. In the chamber, the spectral dead emerge and Hobbes, partially transformed, prepares to take Evie's heart as the final offering. With no holy relic, Evie clutches James's half-dollar pendant and recites the incantation. Hobbes is pulled into the coin, which burns to ash. The mansion erupts in flames, and Evie drags Jericho out as it collapses.

Police release Will and Sam, attributing the murders to an unidentified killer who died in the fire. The resolution is fragile. Will retrieves a classified file linked to Project Buffalo, a secret government paranormal initiative; the file connects Will to the industrialist Jake Marlowe, who supplies Jericho's serum, Will's late fiancée Rotke Wasserman, and Margaret Walker, a former government associate with knowledge of the Diviners, who warns that a greater storm approaches. Memphis rediscovers his healing power to save Isaiah from a trance caused by Blind Bill Johnson, a blind street musician known to Memphis from the Harlem neighborhood who has hidden psychic abilities and has been draining the boy's psychic energy. Memphis's mother's ghost warns him that a storm is coming.

Evie, grieving the loss of her pendant, reveals her abilities as a Diviner, a person with supernatural powers, to reporters on the museum steps. Will tries to send her home, but her public display makes this impossible. On the Bennington's rooftop, Evie and Jericho kiss, though she suppresses guilt about Mabel, who is in love with Jericho. In dreams, James speaks to Evie: "They never should have done it." In the novel's final image, a sinister gray man in a stovepipe hat strides across the American landscape, raising the dead and heralding a far greater cataclysm.