The Mourning Locket

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Book I of <em>The Inheritance Bureau</em></strong></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>When a Civil War-era mourning locket resurfaces from the archives it's logged as a historical artifact.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>It should have stayed that way.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Dr. Cassian Vale and his team at the U.S. Archives' Inheritance Bureau specialize in analyzing objects with unusual data signatures-frequencies that seem to record strong emotional events. They call it emotional acoustics a fringe theory bridging psychology forensics and physics. But when the locket's readings begin to align with active case files the Bureau's investigation turns from archival to criminal.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Each test reveals fragments of a life that shouldn't be traceable-a woman's grief a soldier's final heartbeat an echo of something that refuses to fade. As Cassian and his colleagues-genealogist Arden Locke empath Rowan Vale analyst Ezra Monroe and technician Piper Wren-follow the locket's provenance the data points begin forming a pattern that crosses generations.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>What starts as a recovery mission becomes a race to identify how human emotion can be measured contained and ultimately weaponized. The Bureau's files were meant to protect the public from history. But some histories protect themselves.</span></p><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Mourning Locket</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is the first installment in The Inheritance Bureau a genre-bending thriller that fuses investigation with inheritance science with memory and grief with the systems that study it.</span></p><p></p>