The Mystery of Grace [Paperback]

On the Day of the Dead, the Solona Music Hall is jumping. That's where Altagracia Quintero meets John Burns, just two weeks too late.

Altagracia  her friends call her Grace  has a tattoo of Nuestra Se?ora de Altagracia on her shoulder, she's got a Ford Motor Company tattoo running down her leg, and she has grease worked so deep into her hands that it'll never wash out. Grace works at Sanchez Motorworks, customizing hot rods. Finding the line in a classic car is her calling.

Now Grace has to find the line in her own life. A few blocks around the Alverson Arms is all her world -- from the little grocery store where she buys beans, tamales, and cigarettes ( cigarettes can kill you, they tell her, but she smokes them anyway) to the record shop, to the library where Henry, a black man confined to a wheelchair, researches the mystery of life in death  but she's got unfinished business keeping her close to home.

Grace loves John, and John loves her, and that would be wonderful, except that John, like Grace, has unfinished business  he's haunted by the childhood death of his younger brother. He's never stopped feeling responsible. Like Grace in her way, John is an artist, and before their relationship can find its resolution, the two of them will have to teach each other about life and love, about hot rods and Elvis Presley, and about why it's necessary to let some things go.

Charles de Lint mingles Native American, Hispanic, and Celtic magic to invoke a world where classic hot rods and surf guitar mingle with brujeria and angry ghosts -- and where on nights when the barrier between the worlds is thin, the living and the dead can touch.

Charles de Lintand his wife, the artist MaryAnn Harris, live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His evocative novels, includingMoonheart, Forests of the Heart,andThe Onion Girl,have earned him a devoted following and critical acclaim as a master of contemporary magical fiction in the ml#-