THE FERRYMAN INSTITUTE

Ferryman Charlie Dawson doesn’t save people. Well, he saves dead people — somebody has to convince them to move on to the afterlife, after all — just not the living, breathing sort. Despite falling in the ‘not’ column of ‘like it or not', that's been Charlie’s raison d’être for the past two centuries, and having never failed a single assignment during that entire time, he's acquired a reputation for success that’s as legendary as it is unwanted.

It turns out that serving as a Ferryman is causing Charlie to slowly lose his mind, and after 250 years he’s finally run out of the mental duct tape needed to hold himself together. Deemed too valuable by the Ferryman Institute to be let go and too stubborn to just give up in his own right, Charlie’s pretty much abandoned all hope of escaping his life with his sanity in tact. Or he had, anyway, until he saved 26-year-old Alice Spiegel’s life.

Alice’s plan seemed bulletproof: put the gun to her head, remodel her cranium with a little extra ventilation, then… actually, that was pretty much it. Elegant in its simplicity, Alice firmly believed even she couldn't possibly mess this one up, unlike everything else in her life of late. Unfortunately, Charlie’s sudden, out-of-thin-air appearance in her bedroom was just about the one contingency she hadn't accounted for, and now she’s back again at square one. Yet after some face-to-face time with this complete stranger who somehow knows more than a few things he shouldn’t, Alice can’t decide if something unbelievable is going on or if she’s just gone completely insane (she’s leaning latter). To be fair, Charlie never planned on stopping her — that sort of thing is strictly forbidden by the Institute — but he never planned on the President secretly giving him the choice to, either. Charlie’s not quite sure what to make of it, but Alice is alive, and it's the first time he's felt right in two hundred years.

Which is of course when word of the incident reaches Inspector Javrouche, the Ferryman Institute's resident law-zealot-cum-sanctimonious-bastard. He and Charlie have a bit of history, so with an opportunity for retribution finally at hand, the Inspector decides it’s time to cash in the chip on his shoulder. In spite of Charlie’s protests of innocence, he charges the Ferryman with treason, a crime that carries a punishment far worse than death, and orders his immediate arrest. If that weren’t enough, Javrouche also reveals his plan to find Alice, a person he considers to be an outsider with unwitting knowledge of the Institute’s existence, and help her permanently finish the job she started. But Charlie’s not about to lose the only living, breathing person he’s ever saved without a fight. He’s not just out to protect her from Javrouche, though — he’s out to save Alice from herself, and he’s going to put the entire continued existence of mankind at risk to do it.

Part The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, part A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, part The Rook by Dan O’Malley, THE FERRYMAN INSTITUTE by Colin Gigl is for fans of great characters thrown into epic adventures. Colin graduated from Trinity College with degrees in Creative Writing and Computer Science (no, he’s not quite sure how that happened, either). He lives in Jersey City with his wife, and he currently works at a startup in NYC. THE FERRYMAN INSTITUTE is his first novel.