The Diviners characters

First appears in chapter 2

A seventeen-year-old from Zenith, Ohio: restless, loud, funny, and hungry for a bigger life than a small town will give her. By holding an object she can read its owner's past, picking up scenes and secrets the object has absorbed, a trick she treats as a party game until it goes badly wrong. After she uses it in public to accuse a well-connected young man of fathering a servant girl's child, her parents send her east to live with her uncle in Manhattan. She is still quietly grieving her older brother James, who died in the war, and she carries a keepsake of his everywhere.

First appears in chapter 4

Evie's uncle and reluctant guardian, curator of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, a dusty Manhattan collection the newspapers mock as the Museum of the Creepy Crawlies. A scholar of ghosts, cults, and unexplained phenomena, he is occasionally consulted by the police on cases nobody else can explain. Precise, distant, and forgetful of ordinary life, he deflects every question about his own past.

First appears in chapter 4

The tall, solemn young man who lives at the museum and works as Will's assistant, cataloguing the collection and reading philosophy in what little free time he takes. He keeps rigid habits, speaks bluntly when he speaks at all, and is guarded about his health and about how he came to work for Will.

First appears in chapter 4

A quick-talking young grifter who collides with Evie the day she arrives, kisses her, and walks off with her money. For a few seconds at a time he can make people fail to see him, which is how he has survived alone since he was a boy. He is in New York hunting for his mother, an immigrant woman who vanished years earlier after promising she would come back for him.

First appears in chapter 5

Evie's devoted friend from childhood, living at the Bennington apartments with her parents, labor organizers who spend their lives on other people's causes and rarely notice their daughter's. Serious, kind, and used to standing in Evie's shadow, she is quietly in love with Jericho and hopes someone will finally see her.

First appears in chapter 5

A Ziegfeld Follies dancer living at the Bennington, poised, dry, and unimpressed by almost everything. She shares an apartment with Henry, whom she introduces as her brother, wears long sleeves and gloves more than the weather requires, and refuses to talk about where she came from or how she reached New York.

Also known as Henry Bartholomew DuBois IV

First appears in chapter 5

A songwriter and rehearsal pianist for the Follies, from a wealthy New Orleans family he no longer speaks to. Easy company, hard to rattle, and prone to falling asleep anywhere, he is Theta's closest friend and the one person she trusts with everything.

First appears in chapter 3

A young Harlem poet who runs numbers for a local operator to keep his family fed and writes at night in a notebook he shows nobody. As a boy he was known as the Harlem Healer, laying hands on the sick at his mother's church, until his mother's illness proved beyond him and the gift left him entirely.

First appears in chapter 3

Memphis's younger brother, bright, stubborn, and desperate to be taken seriously. He drops without warning into trances, and afterward repeats numbers, names, and phrases he had no way of knowing, which frightens the adults around him.

First appears in chapter 3

The Campbell brothers' aunt, who took the boys in after their mother's death. Churchgoing, exacting, and unbending, she disapproves of the numbers trade, of anything she considers superstition, and of the healing Memphis used to do.

Also known as Margaret Walker

First appears in chapter 12

A Harlem woman who knew the Campbell boys' mother and keeps a close eye on Isaiah, testing him with cards and paying him for his time. Educated, watchful, and careful with what she says, she shares a history with Will Fitzgerald that neither of them is willing to explain.

First appears in chapter 10

A New York police detective who brings Will the cases nobody at headquarters wants: a murdered girl marked with occult symbols and missing part of her body. Blunt and skeptical, he tolerates the museum's involvement only because nothing ordinary explains what he keeps finding.

Also known as John Hobbes

First appears in chapter 27

The killer working his way through the city, who leaves ritual markings on his victims and takes a different piece from each one. Children in the street skip rope to an old rhyme about him. He proves to be the returned spirit of John Hobbes, who half a century earlier led a doomsday sect at a house on a hill outside the city, murdered his own followers, and was hanged for it.

First appears in chapter 64

A lean figure in a tall stovepipe hat, attended by crows, who appears at the edges of visions and dreams and seems to be waiting for something. Nobody who sees him can say what he is or what he wants.