Being a private investigator wasn’t supposed to be complicated. I expected cheating spouses and missing pets like BonBon, a kidnapped ‘pure-bred Schnoodle’ with a ruby-studded collar. What I didn’t expect was a desperate elf on my doorstep, begging for help to find her missing parents. Nor did I think that my search would drag me back into the magical world I’d tried so hard to leave behind.

Welcome to Fia’s world. Fia hates the dead. If a spirit gets too close, their final moments become her reality. It’s no big surprise she’s developed a raging case of necrophobia, and people think she owns the deluxe edition of crazy. Fia is desperate for a dead-free zone. Signing on with a wilderness search and rescue team seems like the perfect fit - no earthbound spirits in the empty woods, right? Bad assumption. Big mistake.

Call it a premonition. Call it intuition. Call it anything you like, but Pennsylvania State Trooper Jerry McNeal simply thinks of it as “that feeling.” That feeling may come on without warning, so intense he can’t breathe.

Kit McCafferty's life is quiet, unremarkable, and filled with cat hair. In the magical city of Coldstream, located on the border between Scotland and England, Kit is viewed as little more than mildly eccentric and mostly harmless. She passes her days caring for her family of five cats, feeding the local feral moggies, and maintaining relatively good relations with her neighbors. All that changes, however, when a teenage werewolf shows up at her door in the desperate hope of renting out a nearby vacant flat.

Ruby Young's new Boston apartment comes with all the usual perks. Windows facing the brick wall of the next-door building. Heat that barely works. A malfunctioning buzzer. Noisy neighbors. A dead body on the sidewalk outside. And of course, a ghost. Since Cordelia Graves died in her apartment a few months ago, she's kept up her residency, despite being bored out of her (non-tangible) skull and frustrated by her new roommate. When her across-the-hall neighbor, Jake Macintyre, is shot and killed in an apparent mugging gone wrong outside their building, Cordelia is convinced there’s more to it.