A richly imagined dark fantasy that pulses with the beautiful destruction of a town reclaimed by the natural world.

Something is choking the humid, flower-draped river-city of Edinglas. Ghosts stick in its craw and fill the tide, backing up through the drains. Mysteries and horrors crowd in the gutters and seep through walls. Splendid terrors rattle in the night over iron roofs, and swing shrieking in the branches of the paperbark trees. And Charlie Wren, who isn't aware of any of this, can't use that to escape the facts.

Charles and Cora Wren are siblings from an old Edinglas family -- 'old school tie' on the one side, and an even less escapable history of beautiful betrayals, unlikely abilities, and casual murder on the other. But as a boy, Charles traded his birthright for his sister's life. Ever since, he has tried to live a blameless life, out of the way of a world he can't quite see, on the fringes of a subtropical city that won't quite let him leave.

But now Grace, an almost-dead girl with blue roses pressing up through her skin, has come looking for his help. The trees in the hills around Edinglas are bleeding, range towns lost in impossible floods are flickering back into being in the windows of the places built to replace them, and someone is about to strike a bargain with a murderer on whom time has always sat loosely.