Old Yellow Hand

“Old Yellow Hand” a novel by Earnest Mercer
Available: Amazon.com, www.earnestmercerbooks.com, or from the author at emercer2@tampabay.rr.com
A withered old hand still with the stringy remnants of its former attachment, drops from a branch and latches onto a hiker’s scalp. Unable to free himself, he tires after the struggle, whereupon the hand wraps its gnarled fingers around his throat and chokes the life from him. This is but one of many victims of the withered old yellow hand. Many years before, the erstwhile owner of the hand, Baron Goran Goranovich, the despotic ruler of a baronage in Transylvania, is assassinated by an uprising of his oppressed vassals. To prove the baron is dead, they sever his hand, but later fearing a curse store it in an urn of preserving fluid. Two hundred years later, the urn is included in a shipment to a funeral home in the village of Gore, Virginia. When it is accidentally freed by an embalmer, the hand sets off on a trail of grisly murders throughout Virginia before miraculously finding its way back to its home in Goranovichy. A young Transylvanian Romani couple bent upon ridding the world of this monstrosity trace it back to the castle from which it came. They corner the hand in one of the fetid halls of the dilapidated castle, but find their quarry gives them more than they bargained for.