Hesper Dance, live-in caretaker of Peregrine’s Rest, a graveyard founded in 1848, is a manic-depressive, introverted ex-librarian who seeks refuge from life’s disappointments by communing with the dead. Her lifelong ambition is to see a ghost. Inadvertently aiding her in this quest is her new assistant, Quentin Pike, world traveler, adventurer, and mapmaker, and Lydia Webkin, a septuagenarian comic book collector. Ghostly doings will ultimately unite Hesper and Quentin in romantic love, while Lydia, haunted by the spirit of a dead cartoonist with whom she had an affair forty years ago, attracts evil in the form of twins: Argus and Audrey Malvin, a deadly brother-and-sister team prone to grave-robbing, counterfeiting and malice.

Peregrine’s Rest is full of comic book and cemetery lore, and Gostin spikes the spooky intrigue with deft approaches to the question of whether we are bound to our bodies, or whether something survives.