Magali had no intention of returning to the Bookshop.
He had left behind its bargains, its hunger and its impossible demands, and he meant to keep it that way.
Then the cats found him.
Meredith is gone. Taken. And without its curator, the ancient house is beginning to turn feral.
To find her, Magali must rely on the last allies he would have chosen: the daughter of a man who once outwitted the Bookshop, a painter who no longer remembers what he sacrificed to it, and a Guardian barely able to survive beyond its walls.
Their search leads them to Rome. To the Vatican. To an ancient prison beneath the city, where old gods still keep records, custody can last for centuries, and the Bookshop itself has become the subject of a dangerous question.
Because Meredith was no ordinary curator. The Bookshop is no ordinary house.
And if something hungry, violent and ancient has begun to become a person, who gets to decide what happens to it?