Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries meets The Mummy in this fantastical jazz age horror romance where a debutante and a thief have to stop a witch and her army of the undead from claiming the city. 

Josephine (Josie) Payne has her life meticulously planned, down to every detail of her engagement party and the groom she has chosen to fulfill the role. After her mother’s murder, Josie has spent her life building the perfect existence, managed by schedules and lists to avoid the possibility of tragedy striking again. What she did not plan for, however, was an army of the dead crashing her party.

The corpse soldiers are led by a witch who aims to take over the country, and while Theron does have a history of witchcraft and necromancy, Josie finds it all to be absolute poppycock. Except she cannot deny the rotting bodies in front of her eyes or the horrid smell they leave behind. A case of cold feet had sent her to the powder room during the attack, leaving her free to seek help, and the help she finds is Will Garande, a thief hiding in her garage, drinking her very expensive champagne, (an issue she will deal with after he drives her to the police station).

Except the dead have taken over the city, and a second witch prowls the streets, eliminating anything living that gets in her way. The only way Josie can save her family—and her party guests—is to uncover the spell the witches used to call the dead and end it. As Josie unravels the secrets of witchcraft, she finds there are some things impossible to plan for, like falling in love with the ghost who has been haunting her garage for 40 years, or what happens when the dark secrets plaguing her family finally crawl from the grave.