Part of InCryptid, book 14
First published 2025
Mary Dunlavy has spent four generations looking after the Price family. She expected a rest. What she got was a new employer: the anima mundi, the living soul of the Earth, with a job only a phantom can do. Covenant of St. George agents are trapping American ghosts up and down the East Coast, and Mary has to stop them. She would rather be helping her youngest charges learn to read. Instead she is loading into a car with Elsie and Arthur, two grieving siblings still raw from losing their mother, and pointing everyone toward Worcester, Massachusetts. Arthur is coming apart. Elsie is buried in her grief. Mary is dead, technically speaking, and not exactly flush with backup. The anima mundi wants results. Mary's own freedom, so recently won after centuries of service, hangs on whether she can pull this off. She has survived a very long afterlife. She is not ready to be exorcised now.
Genres: mystery, fantasy, supernatural, adult, dark-fantasy, urban-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, character-driven, emotionally-complex, melancholic, suspenseful
Tropes: found-family, grief-processing, mentor-figure, reluctant-hero
Setting: East Coast, Worcester, Massachusetts, America
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
432 pages · Paperback · Tor Books
Content warnings: death