Echo Branson multiverse

Some gifts you are born with, and some come looking for you. Echo Branson has the first kind, a psychic reach she would sooner have refused, and the trouble that finds her runs from cold-case murder to the older, stranger things that do not stay buried. Around her, Linda Kay Silva has built a run of interlaced stories where women stand at the center: sensitives, seekers, investigators, and travelers who slip the leash of ordinary time, each carrying a secret the plot will not let them keep. The shelf gathers a couple dozen books across a handful of linked series. The Echo Branson investigations sit at the heart of it; the time-crossed romances of Across Time cross beside them; companion arcs follow Jessie Ferguson, the Silver Legacy, and Bailey McBride, down to the Sidekicks who orbit them. It is the work of a single hand rather than a shared-world franchise, one author's sensibility, brisk and warm and unafraid of the uncanny, threading detective grit through paranormal suspense and unabashed romance, with queer heroines throughout. Expect mystery that keeps one foot in the heart. The pull here is less the puzzle than the people solving it, and the register swings from spooked to tender inside a page. Newcomers should start where the name does, with Echo Branson, first book first, then follow whichever thread, a ghost, a lover, a leap through time, tugs hardest.