They say the dead should rest in peace. Not all the dead agree. One night, Silas Umber’s father Amos doesn’t come home from work. Devastated, Silas learns that his father was no mere mortician but an Undertaker, charged with bringing The Peace to the dead trapped in the Shadowlands, the states of limbo binding spirits to earth. With Amos gone, Silas and his mother have no choice but to return to Lichport, the crumbling seaside town where Silas was born, and move in with Amos’s brother, Charles. Even as Silas eagerly explores his father’s town and its many abandoned streets and overgrown cemeteries, he grows increasingly wary of his uncle. There is something not quite right going on in Charles Umber’s ornate, museum-like house—something, Silas is sure, that is connected to his father’s disappearance. When Silas’s search leads him to his father’s old office, he comes across a powerful artifact: the Death Watch, a four hundred year old Hadean clock that allows the owner to see the dead. Death Watch in hand, Silas begins to unearth Lichport’s secret history—and discovers that he has taken on his father’s mantle as Lichport’s Undertaker. Now, Silas must embark on a dangerous path into the Shadowlands to embrace his destiny and discover the truth about his father—no matter the cost.

In life, in death: family remains. Silas Umber has finally come into his own as the Undertaker of Lichport when a mysterious invitation calls him beyond the marshes to Arvale, the ancestral manor of the Umbers. There, his extended family endures, waiting for a living Undertaker to return and preside over the Door Doom, an archaic rite that grants a terrible power to summon and bind the dead in judgment. As Silas assumes the mantle of Janus, the Watcher at the Threshold, deep below the earth in the catacombs and sunken towers, grim spirits grow restless at his arrival—hungry for freedom and eager for vengeance against a family with a long history of harsh judgments. Now, Silas must right an ancient wrong and accept that even a house of ghosts can be haunted by its past—for in matters of family, we are who we were.

If Love and Death die, what is left? Silas Umber has returned from Arvale, his family’s ancestral home, having disturbed the tormented spirits of his ancient line. Frantic to retrieve the shade of his beloved Beatrice, he turns his back on the spectral chaos he has left behind, unaware that the malevolence he unleashed has followed him back to Lichport. As his family and friends suffer and fall at the hands of the vengeful Huntsman from Arvale's sunken mansions, Silas must reach deep into his complicated bloodline to summon powers and wisdom beyond those required of a simple Lichport Undertaker. But the dark and painful secrets of his birth threaten to overwhelm him, and if he can’t lay the ghosts of his own past to rest, if he refuses to make the required sacrifice, Silas may lose everything and everyone he has grown to love and worked to protect. With the stunning conclusion to the Undertaken trilogy, Ari Berk returns to the series that Publishers Weekly calls "thought-provoking gothic fantasy," School Library Journal praises as "reminiscent of the classic gothic works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson," and VOYA applauds as "a captivating world that seduces with each page turn."