When Detective Boyce Cooper is abruptly transferred to the secretive Special Affairs Investigation Office, he expects politics? not horror. His first case seems impossible: a man found dead with his brain drained and pus oozing from all seven orifices. But when the corpse walks out of the morgue and sets itself ablaze, reason itself begins to unravel.

As more victims die the same way, a trail of hypnotic jasmine perfume, violet petals, and shadows that move on their own draws Boyce into a web of beauty and terror. The deeper he investigates, the closer he comes to something beyond science? and to the chilling truth about what's really feeding beneath the surface of the city.