The Wrong Sin

St. Louis, 1926. When a family can't bury a man clean, they send for a sin eater — a stranger who takes what the dead man did onto herself, for a fee, and is never spoken to again. Odile has done it for ten years without once being lied to. Then a frightened politician pays her for a sin he won't name, and is shot dead through her window before she's finished.

Now it's inside her. It won't come out. It's killing her — and it's the one thing the men who run the city can't let die with her. They need it moved into a body of their choosing, on a day that is coming. Until then, she is worth more to them alive.

So they give her a keeper. Julian Kerr — gloved, courteous, under contract to put his hands on her once a week and report what he finds. She signs, because the alternative is worse. Then a dying woman's last confession shows her the murder she swallowed: a table in 1904, a price on some farms, a man who said no — and the man who gave the order to kill him.

Julian Kerr's father.

She tells no one. The man keeping her alive is the son of the man whose murder she is carrying — and the only person in the city she can't afford to want.

She asks him what his father did. He refuses. So one night, while the murderer's son sleeps in the next room, she does to him the thing she has only ever done to the dying — and takes it out of his head.

Book One of a duology — the story concludes in The Fourth Clause.