Pandamonium

Kaia Foxx is sixty years old, recently divorced, and running on crackers and the hollow comfort of other people's estate sales. She has a job that fits her like someone else's coat, a house that echoes, and a mental spam folder full of things she should probably deal with someday.She is not, by any measure, looking for a cosmic intervention.Then she reaches for a purple velvet caftan at the chaotic local estate sale known as Pandamonium — and so does Hettie Spinner Vance.Hettie is in her late seventies, possibly older. She drives a battered black truck called the Blackbird, wears approximately seventeen silver rings, and has the particular energy of a woman who has completely run out of patience for other people's nonsense. She is also — as Kaia will discover over extraordinary whisky in an abandoned railway tunnel- considerably more than she appears.Hettie has been at the crossroads since before Rome was a city. She sees the world as a vast web of women's lives, their voices, their compressed and unspent power — and she can see, with the clarity of something very old and very certain, that Kaia's thread has been going unattended for far too long.What follows is one October in New Jersey that will change everything: a ghost in a railway tunnel, a shadow in a strip mall parking lot, a zoning board meeting that becomes an act of ancestral reclamation, and a walnut desk with a lock and no key- until there is. Pandamonium is Book One of the Fierce Companionship trilogy — a fast, funny, fiercely tender novel about midlife awakening, women's friendship, and the power that accumulates in a line of women who were told to be quiet for too long.Fierce Companionship is a three-book trilogy about women at the crossroads of midlife — and the ancient, foul-mouthed, entirely-out-of-patience goddess who shows up to make sure they don't miss what they're becoming.Each book follows a new woman in the same circle of friends as she encounters Hettie Spinner Vance- who drives the Blackbird, tends the web, and has been waiting at the crossroads since before anyone thought to name it. Each story stands alone. Together, they form a single, fierce argument: that midlife is not a diminishment. It is an initiation.Book One: Pandamonium — Kaia reclaims her voice.