There's a bar in New York where the dead come to say goodbye.
Ramona has worked The Rusty Anchor for four years. She knows when a customer needs to talk, when they need silence, when they're about to make a decision they won't survive. She thought it was just bartending.
When her father's health fails, he tells her the truth: he is Death. He has been for seven hundred years. The ledger that records every soul ever guided to the crossing is about to become hers. And the role does not wait for her to be ready.
The ledger is stolen before she can learn what it does. The dead stop moving. The city begins to accumulate the specific wrongness of a system held open past its limit. And the entity who took it: a curse that regained corporeal form centuries ago, that can switch bodies at will, that has been building toward this moment since before Ramona was born, has no intention of giving it back.
She has three weeks to recover the ledger, stop an apocalypse, and figure out whether she can carry an identity she never chose before the world she never asked to save ends without her.