The Diviners recap

New York, 1926. Seventeen-year-old Evie O'Neill, who can read a person's secrets by handling their belongings, is exiled from small-town Ohio to live with her uncle Will, curator of a Manhattan museum of folklore and the occult. When the police ask Will to consult on a ritual murder, Evie attaches herself to the case and secretly reads the victims' possessions. The killer is the returned spirit of John Hobbes, a hanged nineteenth-century cult leader working through eleven prescribed offerings so that a beast will rise when a comet passes over the city. Evie chases the case with the pickpocket Sam Lloyd, her uncle's assistant Jericho, and her friend Mabel, while other young New Yorkers discover gifts of their own: the Harlem healer Memphis Campbell, his visionary brother Isaiah, and the showgirl Theta Knight, who can call fire. Evie becomes a public sensation as a Diviner, is taken as the intended eleventh offering, and destroys Hobbes at his burned-out house. The victory is a local one; her uncle and Sister Walker know that a far larger reckoning is coming.

At a party in an abandoned mansion outside the city, a group of young people amuse themselves with a Ouija board and rouse something that answers them. In Zenith, Ohio, seventeen-year-old Evie O'Neill causes a scandal by holding a young man's pin and announcing in front of everyone a secret about him she could only have learned from the object itself. Her parents pack her off to Manhattan to live with her uncle, Will Fitzgerald, who runs a shabby museum of folklore and the occult that the newspapers call the Museum of the Creepy Crawlies. Evie is delighted rather than punished: New York means speakeasies, dancing, and the chance to be somebody. At the museum she meets Will's severe young assistant, Jericho Jones. Nearby, at the Bennington apartments, she reunites with her old friend Mabel Rose and meets Mabel's neighbours, the Follies dancer Theta Knight and her roommate, the piano player Henry DuBois. Uptown in Harlem, Memphis Campbell runs numbers, writes poems, and tries not to think about the healing gift that left him when his mother died, while his young brother Isaiah falls into trances that frighten their aunt Octavia.

Evie settles into the museum and into the city, though she is short of money after a charming pickpocket named Sam Lloyd relieved her of it on her first day and keeps turning up afterward. The police bring Will a case: a young woman found dead, marked with occult symbols and missing part of her body. Evie insists on coming along, and while nobody is watching she handles the dead girl's belongings and sees fragments of the murder, far more than she can admit without exposing what she can do. Her ability is not a parlour trick. Given an object, she can read its owner's past, and it leaves her with headaches and worse. Will begins working through his collection for a match to the symbols, and Detective Malloy waits impatiently for something useful. Meanwhile Theta and Memphis meet by chance and cannot stop thinking about each other, a connection that would be dangerous for both of them in public. Isaiah's fits continue, and a neighbourhood woman called Sister Walker takes an interest in testing him with cards.

More bodies appear, each killed with the same deliberate care, each missing something different, each staged around a fragment of scripture. Evie, reading objects taken from the victims, feeds Will and the police details she has to disguise as guesswork, and Malloy's patience with the museum thins. Sam talks his way into a job at the museum, ostensibly to work off what he stole, in fact to search Will's files for anything about his missing mother. Will and Sister Walker have a private, tense conversation that makes clear they share a past neither will describe. In Harlem, Memphis and Theta meet in secret, and Isaiah's visions grow more violent. Children in the street skip rope to an old rhyme about a man called Naughty John, and Evie realises it is not nonsense but a description of the murderer the city is hunting.

Will identifies the pattern. The killings follow a book of prophecy belonging to the Brethren, a doomsday sect that lived at a house on a hill north of the city in the eighteen-seventies. Their leader, John Hobbes, murdered his own followers and was hanged for it, and the sect's text describes eleven offerings which, performed in order, are meant to raise a beast at the passing of a comet. Solomon's Comet is due over New York within weeks, each murder matches the next offering, and the count is climbing. Evie, Jericho, Sam and Mabel begin working the case around Will rather than with him, chasing graves, records and old newspaper accounts. Evie's talent is now an open secret in her own circle, and the temptation to use it somewhere the newspapers can see is growing.

Evie gives a public demonstration of her ability at a party, reading strangers' belongings in front of a crowd, and wakes up famous: the papers christen her a Diviner and she becomes an overnight celebrity, to Will's fury and Mabel's discomfort. The killings continue on schedule. Evie learns what Jericho has been hiding, that a childhood illness left him paralysed and that he is kept alive, and made unnaturally strong, by a serum he must take every day as the last surviving subject of an experiment he is forbidden to discuss. Hobbes proves to be more than a ghost, able to take solid form and move through the city at will, and the investigation turns to what is left of him: his remains, his house on the hill, and the pentacle the Brethren wore.

The group works out what Hobbes still needs to finish his sequence, and Evie takes the Brethren's pentacle out of his reach in the hope of stalling him. It makes her a target. Hobbes begins hunting the people around her, and the police, chasing the wrong man entirely, are no help. Uptown, Sister Walker's tests on Isaiah grow more demanding until Octavia forbids them outright, and Memphis is caught between his aunt, his work for the numbers bank, and Theta, whose past he still knows nothing about. The last offerings approach and the comet draws nearer.

The remaining offerings are made in quick succession, and Will's reading of the sect's text makes the eleventh plain: a young woman answering the description of the woman clothed in the sun, taken as a bride at the moment the comet passes. Evie understands that she is the one Hobbes wants and that he has been circling her since she first read one of his victims' belongings. Theta's own secret surfaces: she can call fire, and it is what she used to escape the husband who beat her before she came to New York. Hobbes takes Evie to Knowles' End, the burned house on the hill where the Brethren died, and the others follow.

At Knowles' End, beneath Solomon's Comet, Hobbes prepares the eleventh offering. Evie stalls him with the one thing he cannot control: holding the Brethren's pentacle, she reads him, forcing his own history and his own dead back onto him and refusing to let go while Jericho's unnatural strength keeps him from completing the rite. Hobbes is destroyed and the house burns. Evie survives and decides to be openly, publicly what she is, which is precisely what her uncle wanted to prevent. In Harlem, Isaiah collapses during one of Sister Walker's tests and cannot be roused until Memphis, desperate, lays hands on him and finds the healing he thought he had lost for good. Afterward Will and Sister Walker speak privately about something called Project Buffalo, about how many more Diviners there may be across the country, and about the fact that Naughty John was not the storm but the first sign of it. In a vision, a lean man in a stovepipe hat, followed by crows, stands waiting.

At Knowles' End, with Solomon's Comet overhead, Hobbes prepares the eleventh offering with Evie as its subject. Holding the Brethren's pentacle, she uses the one thing he cannot control, her gift, reading him and forcing his own history and his own dead back onto him while Jericho's unnatural strength keeps him from finishing the rite. Hobbes is destroyed and the house burns. Evie survives, and rather than retreat she steps out publicly as New York's celebrated Diviner, which puts her at odds with her uncle, who wanted her hidden. Sam stays in the city, still hunting the mother who disappeared into a government programme. Jericho's dependence on the serum that keeps him alive is now known to Evie and unresolved. Theta's fire and the husband she fled remain secrets from nearly everyone, and her romance with Memphis is still hidden. Memphis regains his healing gift by pulling Isaiah out of a collapse brought on by Sister Walker's tests, but Isaiah's visions are worsening and Octavia's opposition hardens. In private, Will and Sister Walker acknowledge that they share responsibility for something called Project Buffalo, that the number of young Diviners appearing across the country is no accident, and that Naughty John was not the storm but the first sign of it. In a vision, a lean man in a stovepipe hat, followed by crows, stands waiting.