The King of Crows recap

Previously: Evie O'Neill, who reads the past of any object she touches, came to New York in 1926, helped destroy the spirit of the cult leader John Hobbes, and became famous as a Diviner. She gathered a circle of others with manufactured gifts: the unseen pickpocket Sam Lloyd, the fire-caller Theta Knight, the dream walkers Henry DuBois and Ling Chan, the Harlem healer Memphis Campbell and his visionary brother Isaiah, and Will's assistant Jericho, kept alive by an experimental serum. The dream walkers ended a lethal sleeping sickness beneath Chinatown. Then the whole truth came out: during the war, Evie's uncle Will Fitzgerald, Sister Walker and the industrialist Jake Marlowe ran Project Buffalo, dosing pregnant women to produce Diviners, and their experiment at Hopeful Harbor tore open a door that was never shut. Through it comes the King of Crows, the man in the stovepipe hat, who raises the dead and trades in bargains. When Marlowe demonstrated his Eye machine at his exhibition of the American future, the breach opened wide, the dead poured through, and the Diviners closed it at the cost of Evie's friend Mabel Rose. Marlowe blamed the deaths on them. Hunted by the law and the newspapers, the Diviners scattered and ran, with the dead rising across the country behind them.

The Diviners are fugitives. Marlowe's account of the exhibition disaster is the official one, their faces are in the papers, and government men are looking for them, so the group breaks up and gets out of New York in pieces rather than together. The dead are no longer a New York problem: they rise in fields, towns and cemeteries across the country, and the King of Crows walks among them, unhurried and talkative, calling on the Diviners in dreams to offer terms. Evie is carrying Mabel's death and the knowledge that everything she is was engineered by her own uncle. Ghosts find her, and the ones she loved are not exempt.

The scattered group makes its way across America by whatever means will take fugitives: freight trains, sleeping cars staffed by porters willing to look away, a travelling circus, a barnstorming outfit selling flights at county fairs. Memphis and Isaiah travel with Bill Johnson, and the country they cross is dangerous to them in ways that have nothing to do with ghosts. Theta cannot use the name that made her famous. Henry's dream walking becomes the group's only reliable way of passing messages between parties hundreds of miles apart, and through it a girl none of them has met reaches Isaiah: a young Diviner on a farm far out in the middle of the country who says she knows how the King of Crows can be stopped.

Town by town, the Diviners run into the consequences of the breach: the recently buried walking, whole communities emptied out, people who will not admit what they have seen. They intervene where they can and learn how much their gifts cost when used hard and often. Evie's road takes her back to Zenith, Ohio and the family she left, which forces a reckoning with her mother and with the brother she lost to the war. Marlowe's people stay close behind them, and the King of Crows keeps appearing to each of them alone, always with an offer shaped exactly to what that person wants most.

Piece by piece the group assembles the King of Crows' own history, which is older than the war and older than Project Buffalo, and turns on a bargain he made long ago and a brother he could not keep. Understanding what he is changes what stopping him would mean. Meanwhile Marlowe has not abandoned the Eye: he is rebuilding it, bigger, with government backing, still insisting the breach is a power source rather than a door. The Diviners set out for the farm in the middle of the country where the girl from the dreams is waiting, on the strength of a plan none of them has been able to verify.