‘Death starts before it starts and ends after it ends.’ So say Jack Morgan, the narrator of the story. Jack is an occasional Celebrant, an obsessive quizzer, a professional joke-writer - and a psychic medium who shares his home with what we might call Ghosts, and he calls Shades. Jack lives in 5a with a Shade named Bella, a murdered prostitute. They love each other like brother and sister. As a Shade, Bella is unable to reveal her killer’s identity. So, when Bella’s best friend becomes the killer’s next victim, Jack commits to hunting him down. Forced to confront his own fears and to share secrets he has kept hidden from even his best friends, Jack assembles a most unusual team to help him in his mission. As the hunt progresses and the tension builds, those trying to make sense of this life, and those seeking to do the same with the afterlife, struggle to work together in pursuit of their common cause. Inevitably, as Jack closes in on the killer, he learns powerful life-changing truths about the challenging relationship between love and loss.
