Thursday Next, literary detective and registered dodo owner begins her married life with the disturbing news that her husband of only a month drowned thirty-eight years ago, and no one but Thursday has a memory of him at all. Someone, somewhere, sometime, is responsible. Could it be the ubiquitous Goliath Corporation, who will stop a nothing to get their operative Jack Schitt out of The Raven, the poem in which Thursday trapped him? Or are more sinister forces at work in Swindon?