The Weeping Bartender's Lament

Verity Quill runs the Mourning Room, a supernatural speakeasy in a converted Victorian funeral parlor in Portland, where the drinks are strong, the drapes are heavy, and the bartender cries whenever someone nearby is about to die. It is a family curse. She has never once been able to stop it. Two patrons die in two nights, and both times Verity cried and got nothing for it. Both were cataloguing the parlor's original 1880s funeral ledgers for the historical society, and someone is using those ledgers to fake a Victorian pattern of deaths. The society's archivist, Hollis, is the first person who has ever helped her read her own curse. Together they trace the murders to a board member forging haunted provenance and selling parlors to the highest bidder — and she has just locked the doors on the society's closing gala. Some curses hurt. This one is going to save a life.