It's been the weirdest year of Joanne Walker's life, and the last thing she wants is for it to go out with a bang, magically speaking.

Then again, she can't remember the last time she got what she wanted, either. She's lost Coyote, her shamanic mentor. The burgeoning relationship with her boss, Captain Morrison, has been put on the back burner. And now? Now, as Joanne is drawn away from Seattle's safety into the wintery woods of the Pacific Northwest, people she'd left in her past begin to reappear, forcing her to deal with emotional turmoil she's kept bottled up for years-which is not the mental space she needs to be in to fight a cannibalistic serial killer linked to the shamanically powerful spiritual plane known as the Lower World.

And worst of all (at least in terms of making her supernaturally-influenced life seem as normal as possible on the surface), a reporter is sure there's a story buried somewhere in the messy investigations that Joanne always seems to be involved in. Keeping the people around her safe gets more difficult with every passing hour, until it's no longer possible to separate the mundane and the mystical, and Joanne has to use every ally she's got to win the fight of the day.

The grim truth is, it's been the weirdest year of her life...so far.