The 16h House

A quiet student, Mia wishes for nothing more than to blend into the crowd and be forgotten. Her grandmother, who raised her alone, the family her grandmother refuses to talk about, the occult objects that filled her childhood and exert an inexplicable fascination over her—all of this she chooses to ignore. But when she discovers a strange tarot deck hidden under the floorboards of the apartment where she grew up, she has no idea just how irrevocably her life is about to change.

Indeed, the cards she has found are not just any cards; they belong to the Fool’s Tarot, the most powerful and feared among the members of the Jocus, a parallel society governed by occultism and cartomancy. Unwittingly, Mia now finds herself the sole owner of this highly coveted deck.

Accompanied only by Hyacinthe, her childhood friend who swears by science and logic, she is inadvertently thrust into the heart of the conflicts in this strange underground world, where tarot reigns supreme and lives are predestined. But the balance of the Jocus is disturbed; the magic of the cards is faltering, strange misty creatures prowl the sunny streets of the Mediterranean, and a mysterious figure haunts Mia’s visions…

With the help of Zaffiro, heir to one of the most influential Houses of the Jocus, and Luciana, a cartomancer as talented as she is enigmatic, Mia and Hyacinthe set out to find the source of the magical disturbances. But in this world, the cards have already been dealt, the dice already cast. Can Mia and her companions escape the inevitable path the Tarot has laid out for them?