The World of Author C.T. Rook

Hollow Echoes

Old cities, older bargains, and the people stubborn enough to read the fine print.

↓  Enter the ledger

In a Chicago older than its skyline, the world's oldest firm has been quietly buying what no one else will insure — endings. One investigator can read the worst hour an object ever witnessed. One detective can hear death approach. Together they work the files no one is meant to survive alone.

The Trilogy

The Books

A complete slow-burn urban fantasy romance — for readers of Ilona Andrews, Jim Butcher, and K.F. Breene.

Cover of The Memory of Ashes, Hollow Echoes Book One

Hollow Echoes · Book One

The Memory of Ashes

He can see how you died. She knows when you will.

Five bodies, seated, facing the center of the flames. Five blank silver coins, cold as a vault. The fire wasn't the crime — it was the delivery. To follow the coins, Jack Merrick and Vivian Cross will have to work one case neither can survive alone: through grief groups that feed a hidden market, a midnight auction where last words sell by the case, and a four-hundred-year-old firm whose oldest product was never on any brochure.

Read on Amazon Kindle
Cover of A Grave Inheritance, Hollow Echoes Book Two

Hollow Echoes · Book Two

A Grave Inheritance

The firm that owns every ending has finally come to collect.

The oldest company in the world has opened its books, and the account it needs to balance is Jack Merrick — one memory at a time. They have until All Souls' Day. To win, Jack and Vivian must prove the unprovable to the one power that prices everything: that some things are only real because someone refuses to let them go.

Coming Soon to Kindle

Hollow Echoes · Book Three

The Estate of Endings

The winding-up comes due. The conclusion of the Hollow Echoes trilogy — coming soon.

A Hollow Echoes Spin-Off Serial · Coming Soon

The Vellum Market

A midnight auction for the things that can't be held — last words, first loves, a single held note of a laugh. Standalone gothic novellas set in the world of Hollow Echoes, following a runner who pays a true thing about herself every time she walks through the door… and is running out of truths to spend.

Cover of The Last Word, The Vellum Market Nº 1

The Vellum Market · Nº 1

The Last Word

Everything can be sold. Even the last thing a dying man says.

Admission to the Market is one true thing about yourself, surrendered at the door. Orla Fenn has been paying her way in for six years — a runner who finds the desperate and carries what they're breaking apart to sell to the block. Her newest lot is a widow's grief, an easy cut… until she hears what the words really say, and finds a buyer already waiting for them by name.

Coming Soon to Kindle
C.T. Rook — Hollow Echoes

About the Author

C.T. Rook

C.T. Rook writes urban fantasy about old cities, older bargains, and the people stubborn enough to read the fine print. The Hollow Echoes trilogy is a slow-burn romance set in a Chicago where love is the one asset a four-century ledger was never able to price.

Warm hearts inside a cold system; a psychometric investigator and the detective who hears death coming; and the quiet, ferocious argument at the center of every book — that a kept thing is worth more than a collected one.

— C.T. Rook