From the author of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me comes a speculative thriller about the ties that bind us to places and people, perfect for fans of Andrew Joseph White and Tochi Onyebuchi.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Jamison Shea’s Roar of the Lambs, which releases on August 26th 2025.
If you knew the world was ending, who would you save? And would they let you?
Sixteen-year-old Winnie Bray is a liar. As the resident psychic at an oddities shop, Winnie truly can see the future. But her customers only want reassurance, and Winnie only wants their money. Favorable fortunes are a fast track to funding her way out of Buffalo, New York for good, after all.
But all of that changes when a vision sends her stalking in the remains of her family home that burned down in a fire 10 years ago. Among the ash and rubble, Winnie finds a box made of bone, untouched by flames and…whispering. At the touch of her finger, the box shows her a vision of death, chaos, and apocalypse, with her and rich kids Apollo and Cyrus Rathbun at the center.
Apollo knows their cousin is up to no good, and with the Rathbun family scattered to the wind, they know Cyrus is aiming to present himself as the new patriarch. Despite an initial attraction, Apollo is reluctant to believe Winnie. But soon it becomes clear that their family histories are intertwined, with the whispering, hungry box at the very center, and more than their lives are on the line. Together, they must discover the origins of the box and stop unforeseen forces from fulfilling the apocalyptic prophecy, or die trying.
“Am I gonna die here?”
Winona Bray charged extra for death predictions. Every time someone fixed their mouth to ask whether they’d die young, in this place, and when, she insisted on a death fee to ensure at least she’d have enough to get out alive.
Fortune seekers drawn to the Red Hourglass were predictable with their questions, the nervous way they tried to skirt around what preoccupied and scared them most. It always started with love or money—whether to go on the date or play the lotto, take the new job or finally break up—but then, with their whistles wet, the people of Buffalo loved to end with, Will I die here? Young? Please, oh great Cassandra, will you tell me if I see the world?
Truthfully, all of it bored her, but it was good for business.
And right after she charged them their death fee, when they sat across the table from her, begging, she’d do what she always did: take their palms in hers, peer right past the depths of their souls, into the web of their futures, and then lie.
Winona Bray was psychic, but she was also a liar.
She dropped the customer’s sweaty palms and wiped hers on the underside of the thick, velvet tablecloth. Draped in a haphazard way, it felt a little too expensive for this, and she couldn’t believe Hortense would spend so much for such a price-gouging gimmick—an illegal one at that—but the Red Hourglass wasn’t Winnie’s shop. Expensive cloth covered in hand sweat wasn’t her problem.
Despite the setting September sun peeking through a slit in the heavy curtains, it was hard to see the young man. He was obscured by the thick haze of incense burning in each corner of the room, the plumes of black opium smelling musky and sweet, but still Winnie looked dead at him—at his greasy hair shoved under a faded beanie, the silver ring through his lip that was red, inflamed, obviously infected—and smiled.
“Yes, I saw your fate,” she admitted, speaking slowly with a rasp in her voice and hoping the effect made her seem wise and mysterious. “It brings you to Cincinnati—have you ever been?”
At the mention of the city, his eyes gleamed.
She knew his answer already, the same way she knew other things he hadn’t asked or said. Like his hair was overgrown because he was afraid of haircuts ever since his aunt clipped his ear trying to make him look like a member of BTS. He was a barista at a Starbucks downtown, which he hated, but only because the local spots wouldn’t hire him. She knew that he would remain here for another seventeen years, driving down every day from that poor Irish corner of Tonawanda up north, until his dad got sick from all the drinking—because what else was there to do here?—and then he’d head over to the car parts plant out in Lockport and take over the shifts. The only reason he even wandered into this shop was because he choked on an ice cube last night at a barbecue, which made him think about death, and he’d parked so close to a fire hydrant just to ask his inane question that he’d have a ticket waiting for him when he was done.
Not that she said any of this.
He nodded stiffly, mystified. “No, I’ve never been, but my sister moved there a couple years ago! I keep meaning to visit. Wow.”
Winnie knew that he was going to die in Buffalo exactly the way he was born, crying in a dark car on the side of the road. Except this time, he’d be alone, wrapped around a telephone pol at age sixty-seven, and only his ashes would make it out—sitting in his niece’s trunk as she drove all the way back home. To Cincinnati.
She was best at knowing the little things, all the secrets and bad details no one ever wanted to hear.
“Don’t worry—you’ll make it out of here one day,” promised Winnie, giving him a bland, watery smile that made all her clients smile back. And tip.
