Sentenced to the pillory for the crime of having kissed a man, Jasper Marin has been stripped of his vocation as a priest, and seems poised to lose his faith with it. He has always been able to see ghosts but it's just like his luck that the one who's harrassing him now seems obsessed with collecting human hearts.

Charles Latham, wastrel younger son of the Earl of Clitheroe, returns home drunk from the theatre to find his father gruesomely dead. He suspects murder. But when the Latham ghosts turn nasty, and Charles finds himself falling in love with the priest brought in to calm them, he has to unearth the skeleton in the family closet before it ends up killing them all.

Charles and Jasper are brought in to investigate a fatal stabbing in (the cotton-mill town of) Paradise. But this time the only troublesome ghost in the case is their own adopted child Lily. So what’s leaving the glistening trail in the woods? Why did the vicar’s daughter suddenly kill herself? And where are the missing cows?