In Sugarglade, magic is measured in sugar, probability, and souls.
When master confectioner Maribel Truffet is dragged into her own thirty-foot chocolate fountain and drowned before ten thousand witnesses, the city's flawless ledger records an impossible signature: Reaper Shadow Grim authorized the kill.
Framed for a murder that fuses three forbidden disciplines of confectionery architecture, probability hexes, and infernal soul-harvesting, Shadow is given a choice by the ruthless Magister: solve the case in four days or join the dead. His only allies are the city's most dangerous outcasts: a guilt-ridden dice cheat who once drowned his own brother in bad luck, a disgraced tiefling alchemist whose doctoral thesis became the murder weapon, an unlicensed baker whose illegal dough-golem nearly unspooled when it touched the killer's trap, and a blind oracle who sees every future except the one that saves them.
As more Founders die and the carnival's sugar-stone infrastructure begins to fracture, this volatile crew must learn to trust one another or watch Sugarglade devour itself. Their only hope lies in forging an impossible consent cake: a paradox ritual that demands they hold six contradictory truths at once while the sky tears open and an infernal contract comes to collect.
Some recipes require patience.
Some require blood.
This one requires everything.