The Bast series features a Wiccan amateur female detective who lives in New York City and works as a graphics designer. The three novels featuring her—Speak Daggers to Her (1994), The Book of Moons (1995), and The Bowl of Night (1996) were collected in the omnibus volume Bell, Book, and Murder. Failure of Moonlight contains all the short stories and novellas featuring Bast. Burden of Guilt appears here in its first mass-market publication.