Keeper of the Bees

A Golden Heart (R) winner for Best Young Adult Romance, this companion novel to Black Bird of the Gallows is perfect for fans of Maggie Stiefvater or Leigh Bardugo.

KEEPER OF THE BEES is a tale of two people who are both beautiful and beastly, and whose pasts are entangled in surprising and heartbreaking ways. Dresden is cursed. He houses a hive of bees in his chest, which he can’t stop from stinging people with psychosis-inducing venom. He has been this way for centuries - since he was eighteen and magic flowed through his homeland, corrupting its people. He follows a troupe of harbingers of death to a Midwest town marked for impending disaster. There, he encounters Essie, a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from debilitating delusions and hallucinations. His bees want to sting her on sight, but Essie doesn’t see a monster when she looks at Dresden, prompting him to hold back his bees and spare her. What starts out as a simple act of mercy ends up unraveling Dresden’s solitary life and Essie’s tormented one. An impossible romance blooms, even as Essie is pulled into a murder investigation and Dresden embarks on a desperate quest to unravel a centuries-old curse.