"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to play with dead things?"
Nephys, a child of Limbo, works as a scribe in the Halls of the Great Master, Death himself. The afterlife as it turns out is a pretty complicated place, and needs clerks and bean counters just like any big operation.
Limbo is dark, dreary and dull, but that doesn't mean it's without danger. Emotions are the only food in Limbo for hungry shades, lost souls who hunt the edges of the city and prey on those that exhibit too much misery. Nephys has survived in Limbo for more than a thousand years because he's learned to keep his emotions in check, but all that changes when he encounters the frantic soul of a recent car accident victim, Maggie Miller.
After the death of her mother Maggie, Lucy finds herself alone with even bigger problems than suddenly being an orphan. She discovers that her mother and her were the last of a race of necromancers, but her mother died without passing on the family secrets. Now Lucy is being hunted by dead things: long haired phantoms and even worse, vampires! with no one to turn to for help.
In the underworld, Nephys finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy to overthrow the land of the living. To save both this world and the next he will have to travel back to the land of the living, taking with him Maggie's last message for her daughter.
