Description

Death smells rot in a Birmingham hospital—and realises someone is binding the newly dead to their bodies.

At the same time, Daisy, fourteen, begins drawing lost souls like a lighthouse. Tobias Staghorn—lecturer, reluctant prophet, the man Music once chose—opens his door to the impossible: Music has a body again, and love is suddenly crowded.

From snow-slick winter into a tense spring across the Midlands and London, A&E doctor Stuart Murray returns just as "impossible patients" stop dying on schedule. Death, elegant and furious, stalks the wards with a scythe she'd rather not use.

The world is quietly uncanny and precisely bounded: Death, Music, and Time are real, embodied, and limited. Death can guide but not choose. Music can kindle feeling but not command consent. Time can braid a soul's tether, but every crossing must belong to the soul itself. Around the crisis, a small constellation holds fast: Rosie's loyalty, Lily and Troy at Tiger Lily, and Tobias and Stuart negotiating a hungry, tender power exchange that keeps colliding with work, old wounds, and what neither of them will say aloud.

To free the jammed passage between life and afterlife, Death needs answers. Tobias wants a department built, a grief faced, and a love he won't ruin. Stuart wants to save bodies without losing himself. Daisy just wants the noise to stop. As shadow ghosts thicken and hospitals buckle, what do they owe the living, the dead—and each other—when Time himself is the sabotage?

In the Shadow of Death is Book 2 of The Tobias & Stuart Trilogy (best read in order).

Content notes: explicit consensual intimacy (including kink with explicit consent); medical trauma detail; grief and harassment; one attempted sexual assault referenced on-page; hate-crime themes; frequent strong language.