When the Raven Queen throws a party at her crumbling ancestral house in Highgate, Maverick Hale expects politics. He gets a body count. A horse-shifter lies dead in the garden, Calixta Darkholme's grand gesture of unity is in ruins, and the London shifter community — already uneasy at the return of bird-clan royalty — is fracturing along fault lines centuries in the making.

While Domino and the Storm Moon pack help DI Maggie Milne hunt a killer through the city's oldest paranormal corridors, Maverick's investigation into the Blackwood dynasty begins to converge on a darker truth: the Raven King came to London before. He took what he wanted then. And whoever is moving the pieces this time knows exactly what was stolen — and from whom.