Once upon a time?and isn't that how they always start, these tales we tell to warn ourselves about the woods, the wolf, the wanting?

Vivienne Lacroix has spent six years balancing the books for the Chicago mob, keeping her head down, and cleaning up her brother's gambling debts. When crime boss Sal Moretti offers to clear Tommy's latest disaster in exchange for one job securing an old property in the countryside Viv thinks she's getting off easy.

She's wrong.

Ashworth Manor is no ordinary estate. Its walls are papered with hand-drawn maps that don't describe reality they command it. The woman who lived there was a cartographer, one of a secret sisterhood who draw the lines between this world and the hungry things that press against its borders. And Viv, who has spent her whole life seeing boundaries others can't, has just inherited the job.

But she's not alone in the house.

Étienne has been bound to the barrow beneath the manor for two hundred years, a man turned monster, forced to serve as the face and hands of something ancient and terrible. He's killed a hundred people at the barrow's command. He's forgotten what it feels like to choose.

Until Viv.

As Sal circles closer and the borders begin to fail, Viv must master a power she never asked for, protect a brother who can't stop making the same mistakes, and decide whether the monster in the shadows is her enemy or the only one who truly sees her.

Some lines are drawn to keep things out. Some are drawn to set things free.

The Cartography of Bones is a gothic dark fantasy about the borders we build between ourselves and the dark, the price of power, and the terrifying hope of loving something that might destroy you.

For readers who like their fantasy dark, their romance slow-burn, and their monsters worth saving.