Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth in a velvet box, with a note from 1888 saying it belonged to a young Edgar Allan Poe. When he converts an old church to a bookshop selling strange and occult titles, he displays the tooth there, calling the store Poe's Tooth Books.

But the bookstore has been bought with blood money: Oliver and his wife Rosie received a large cash settlement when their young daughter Chloe was left brain-damaged after a hit-and-run accident. Rosie hopes the child will soon return to normal, but Oliver is secretly relieved by his daughter's condition, dreading that if she recovers she'll reveal a terrible truth about him. Then one freezing night a raggedy, skeletal crow comes into the shop and refuses to leave. The bird infiltrates their lives, altering Oliver and Rosie's relationship and affecting Chloe in strange ways. It becomes a dangerous presence in the firelit, shadowy old church. Inexorably, the family, the tooth, the crow, and their story will draw to a terrifying climax.

Wakening the Crow is an unsettling novel of creeping menace by a modern-day master of psychological horror, Stephen Gregory, award-winning author of the contemporary classic The Cormorant.