A Dirty Job

Charlie Asher is an anxious secondhand-store owner in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. When his wife, Rachel, gives birth to their daughter, Sophie, Charlie obsesses over the baby's health, irritating the hospital staff. He briefly leaves the hospital but returns with a Sarah McLachlan CD for Rachel and finds Minty Fresh, a very tall Black man dressed in mint green and a stranger to Charlie, standing beside her bed. Moments later, Rachel is dead from a cerebral thromboembolism, a blood clot that traveled to her brain during labor. Hospital security footage shows no one entered the room, and doctors dismiss Charlie's account as a hallucination.

Sedated and devastated, Charlie returns home with Sophie. His older sister, Jane, helps care for the baby during shivah, the Jewish period of mourning. During that first week, Charlie goes downstairs to his shop in the dark and sees certain objects glowing a dull red. Strange events escalate: Two weeks later, he spots a man at an ATM carrying an umbrella that glows red. When Charlie calls out, the man stumbles off the curb and is killed by a bus, and Charlie watches a tar-black hand reach from a storm drain and snatch the glowing umbrella. That night, he finds the dead man's name, William Creek, written in his own handwriting on a notepad beside his bed, along with the number 12. Meanwhile, Lily, Charlie's teenage Goth employee, opens a package addressed to the shop and discovers The Great Big Book of Death, a colorful illustrated manual. Believing she has been chosen for some dark purpose, Lily hides the book.

A striking pale redhead enters the shop carrying a glowing silver cigarette case and tells Charlie he makes people die. She advises him to find whoever was present when his world changed. Charlie tracks Minty Fresh to Fresh Music, a record store in the Castro district. Minty explains that both he and Charlie are 'Death Merchants,' people chosen to collect soul vessels, objects containing the souls of the recently dead, and ensure those souls pass to their next lives through secondhand commerce. Names and numbers appear at their bedsides: The number indicates how many days remain to retrieve the vessel during bardo, the 49-day transition between death and rebirth described in Tibetan Buddhism. Minty warns that if they fail, dark forces called Underworlders will rise. Before Charlie leaves, he hears a female voice from a storm drain threatening his daughter.

Beneath the city dwell three ancient Celtic death goddesses: Macha, Nemain, and Babd, known collectively as the Morrigan. They share their domain with Orcus, a bullheaded demon. These shape-shifters can take the forms of ravens or shadowy women with silver claws. Charlie's failures to collect soul vessels have allowed them to absorb the lost souls and grow stronger, manifesting physical bodies for the first time in centuries.

Lily eventually reveals she has had the book all along. Charlie reads it and learns the basics: Retrieve the glowing soul vessels before the countdown expires, tell no one, and never let a vessel fall into the Underworlders' hands. He settles into his role, walking the city each morning, finding vessels in unlikely places, and developing a sense of purpose. Inspector Alphonse Rivera, a homicide detective, begins a wary acquaintance with Charlie after catching him dropping firecrackers into storm drains to taunt the sewer voices.

Sophie develops a terrifying ability: She can kill living things by saying the word "kitty." After she accidentally kills a kitten and an old man in the park, Charlie is horrified. One night, Macha infiltrates the apartment to attack Sophie, but an unseen force hurls the creature through the window. The next morning, two enormous black dogs appear at Sophie's side with silver collars reading "Alvin" and "Mohammed." The hellhounds become Sophie's permanent, indestructible guardians.

Charlie's understanding of death deepens when he retrieves the soul of Madeline Alby, a dying woman who can see him when no one else can. Watching Madeline eat cheese with her family in her final hours, savoring every bite, teaches Charlie that living fully in the present is central to understanding death.

Years pass. Jane and her girlfriend, Cassandra, urge Charlie to start dating again, but his loneliness persists. His mother, Lois, dies of cancer in Sedona, Arizona. There, Charlie meets Vern Glover, a local Death Merchant whose version of The Great Big Book mentions the Luminatus, a Great Death prophesied to rise in the "City of Two Bridges" to battle the Forces of Darkness. Charlie begins to suspect he is the Luminatus.

Back in San Francisco, Charlie struggles with two overdue soul vessels. One subject, Esther Johnson, has been hidden by Audrey, a practitioner at a local Buddhist center, while the other, Irena Posokovanovich, is alive at her sister's house and refuses to die. The situation deteriorates as the Morrigan attack Death Merchants across the city, killing some and stealing their soul vessels. Orcus smashes through Charlie's shop window and takes his entire collection.

Charlie and Minty Fresh track the missing vessels to the Three Jewels Buddhist Center, where they confront Audrey, a former Tibetan Buddhist monk who learned p'howa, the art of transferring consciousness at death. Audrey has been buying soul vessels from secondhand shops, believing she was rescuing imprisoned souls, and transferring them into small constructs built from taxidermied animal parts, creations she calls "squirrel people." She also uses a lost ritual to prevent six dying people from passing on, inadvertently disrupting the cosmic balance and fueling the Underworlders' rise.

Charlie and Audrey fall in love. Among her collected vessels, Charlie finds Rachel's soul inside the Sarah McLachlan CD and breaks down. He tells Audrey he believes he is the Luminatus.

After Orcus raids the Buddhist center and steals the remaining soul vessels, Charlie decides to enter the Underworld. He arms himself, says a wrenching goodbye to Sophie, and leads the squirrel people into the storm sewers beneath the city. Deep underground, they discover the Morrigan's lair: a massive grotto containing a black ship built of bones and moored in a shallow lake. Charlie fights aboard the ship, shooting Orcus and battling the Morrigan, but they heal themselves using stolen soul vessels and close in. Nemain's venomous claw pierces Charlie's armor, delivering a fatal wound.

Sophie arrives with the hellhounds. She raises her hand and vaporizes each of the Morrigan, releasing thousands of consumed souls. She tells her stunned father that she, not he, is the true Luminatus.

Charlie is carried home, fatally poisoned. As he hands Rachel's CD to Audrey, the red glow extinguishes at her touch, indicating Rachel's soul has transferred to Audrey. Charlie tells Audrey he loves her and dies.

In the aftermath, the dark forces retreat to the Underworld. Jane and Cassandra marry and raise Sophie, who will one day assume her full role as the Luminatus. Minty Fresh and Lily open a jazz and pizza restaurant in Charlie's old building. Rivera receives The Great Big Book of Death in the mail, a sign that he has been recruited as a new Death Merchant. Audrey continues her work cycling squirrel people back into human bodies, and her latest creation is Charlie himself, reanimated as a fourteen-inch-tall figure with a crocodile's face, a purple silk robe, and the power of speech.