Detective Bill Grant has seen it all in Orangefield — and always around Halloween. For that is when Samhain, the Celtic Lord of the Dead who has made this pumpkin-growing upstate New York town his home, plies his trade.

But this year when Autumn rolls around, Grant is confronted with something brand new — and even more horrifying than anything he has seen before.

For when Marianne Carlin finally gets the gift she has been waiting for, a child from her husband Jack, it turns out that the baby was conceived after Jack’s sudden death in an automobile accident.

Which means the child may not belong to this world at all….