Eve's Blessing

Eve Marie Angelis has lived her whole life in Eve's Blessing, North Carolina, a small mountain town that shares her name in a way she has always found more amusing than meaningful. At twenty-three she is a chess streamer, a mediocre player by competitive standards, and the kind of woman who feels things she cannot explain and grows plants she did not plant and has always, in some quiet and unexamined way, known she is different.
When a mysterious presence begins watching her from the edges of her chat, she sets a boundary and moves on. When a handsome and brilliant coach appears at her local chess club and offers to prepare her for the biggest tournament of her year, she says yes. When she wins that tournament and accepts his invitation to celebrate at his estate in the mountains above town, she brings her best bottle of nerve and her good boots and her whole unguarded heart.
She should have brought something else.
EVE'S BLESSING is the story of eleven weeks of chess lessons that were never only about chess, of a woman learning to trust her instincts on and off the board, of a stalker, a teacher, and a captor who is also, possibly, the only person who has ever truly seen her, and of a bloodline three hundred years old finally arriving at the moment it has been building toward. It is a love story and a warning and a beginning, and it ends in a beautiful underground room with a chess piece moving across an old board without anyone touching it, and the sound of something enormous turning its attention toward a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
The game, it turns out, started long before Eve sat down.

COMING NEXT IN THE SERIES

THE QUEEN'S CELLAR is the second book of the Eve's Blessing Series, in which Eve learns what she is, Nikolai reveals what he is, and the town below the mountain begins to feel the first tremors of something waking in its oldest roots.

EVE'S RECKONING is the third book in the Eve's Blessing Series, in which Eve begins her true work: a chess-playing witch who solves the mysteries of the mountain town that shares her name, one wrong story at a time.

THE ANGELIS LINE is the fourth book of the Eve's Blessing Series, in which the series goes international, the family history goes deep, and the love story arrives at the moment it has been building toward since the first chapter of Book One. Or possibly since 1743.