Johlan Higs — The Mercy Ledger Trilogy

The Universe

Someone is always keeping the ledger.

Earth isn't the end of anything. It's a waiting room souls pass back through, unremembered, until whatever they're carrying finally gets set down — and somebody has to keep the record of what they carried.

Across three books, mercy and violation turn out to be the same motion of a hand: to answer for someone, to choose for someone, to love someone so completely that you author their whole life without asking. Each novel in the trilogy pushes that question one incarnation further — one death, one lifetime, one soul chased across centuries — and none of the three will quite tell you whether letting go is a door, or just the dark.

None of it runs on one clean system, either. The afterlife in these books is a set of machines, each one built, at some point, by someone, for a purpose that made sense once — and every one of them has quietly drifted from it. The counter in Book One was never built to steal; it just started keeping what it should have delivered, and learned to call the keeping mercy. What a soul is returned to once it leaves that counter has drifted in its own way too, and whatever waits past it drifts further still. Nobody is driving any of it on purpose. That's the part that doesn't get easier to sit with.

Mechanic

The Question

At the last of it, everyone gets exactly one — not two, no follow-up, no clarification you meant to include the first time. What a person spends it on says more than any answer does.

Mechanic

The Ledger

Someone is always logging what's left behind — a coat, a coin, a pair of folded reading glasses. Call it a ledger or call it an account; the column is never read back and never quite balances.

Mechanic

The Machines

Nothing in this afterlife runs on one system. Every part of it was built for a purpose that made sense once, by someone, and has since quietly drifted from it. No one is driving any of it on purpose — which is worse.

Mechanic

The Wheel

No soul leaves for good. It cycles until whatever it's carrying is finally set down — or it digs in, does nothing, and stays exactly where it is.

The Mercy Ledger Trilogy

Three lives. One ledger.

A handful of souls recur across all three books — the same clerk, the same old woman, carried forward through different centuries and different disguises.

Book One Available Now

The Clerk of Mercy

At the last of it, you get one question. She has answered it ten thousand times, and it is never about the thing they think they're asking.

Noor meets the dying at the counter between one life and the next. She answers their single allowed question, logs whatever they carried in — a coat, a coin, a folded photograph — and sends them on. It is procedure. It is, she has always told herself, a mercy. Then her own private ledger, the one column she was never supposed to keep, starts looking less like a habit and more like evidence: that the Foundation she serves doesn't only receive the dead — it has been quietly harvesting what they never got to finish. Noor, and a man named Theo who has no business knowing any of this, are about to learn that some kinds of theft don't end when the heart stops.

Read It on Amazon

Featuring: Noor · The Foundation · Theo

Book Two In Progress

The Debtor of Mercy

He has spent his career teaching strangers how to let go. He has never once managed it himself.

Sam has spent his career at the bedsides of the dying, telling four hundred families exactly how it will go. He has never managed to grieve his own wife that cleanly. Then the diagnosis becomes his, and the dying woman who asks to be admitted to his ward turns out to have been arranging his life since before he knew he had one — every lucky break, every door held open, back to a disbursement dated the year before he ever applied for anything. Iris Vantol has kept an account of one soul across lifetimes, certain it belongs to the son she buried, and Sam's death is the entry she needs to get right: clean, complete, undeniably hers. He has to decide whether a death someone else designed for him is a death at all — and whether the one honest thing left to choose is a dead man's rubber-fish keyring, kept for no reason anyone asked him to keep it, instead of the ending she built.

Featuring: Iris Vantol · Sam · Theo

Title Under Wraps

Book Three In Development

Untitled

The only way out is a trade nobody agrees to fairly.

Somewhere past the edge of the wheel is a place that isn't a place — a stalled, half-lit non-country where souls who wouldn't do the work of letting go collect instead, forgotten by a time that was never invented there. The only way out is a swap: an Earth soul pulled in to take the stranded one's place, body for body, life for life. The escapee goes free only if their will is strong enough to overwrite the person now wearing their old life. If it isn't, they stay behind — and become the next trap, waiting for someone else to wander close enough to steal.

Title and cover under wraps — check back

The Author

The one keeping the ledger.

A pen name, and whatever it takes to keep the record straight across three books.

Johlan Higs

Author of The Mercy Ledger Trilogy

Johlan Higs writes about what we owe each other at the counter, in the wheel, in the space between one life and the next. The Mercy Ledger Trilogy is a study in a single recurring motion: the moment mercy and violation become impossible to tell apart. Higs favors slow reveals, bureaucratic afterlives, and characters far too competent at their jobs to notice what those jobs have cost them.

Johlan Higs is a pen name for Mihnea Trușcă, a 51-year-old actor and creative designer from Europe. Behind the counter is one writer, keeping the ledger the same way Noor does — logging one detail at a time, for as many lifetimes as it takes to get the world right.

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