The Nazis have the tanks. She has the ghosts.
Oxford, 1939. The world is holding its breath for war. But for Bathsheba "Batty" Vane, the war has already started in the shadows.
A brilliant but chaotic historian with a scandalous reputation and a talent for the "Sight," Batty prefers the company of dead writers to living soldiers. She spends her days arguing with the Dean and her nights in a haze of absinthe and incense. But when a parrot possessed by the spirit of a dead magician crashes through her window screaming a cipher, Batty is dragged into a conflict far older than the Third Reich.
Recruited by Section 13—a British intelligence unit that doesn't officially exist—Batty discovers a terrifying truth: Hitler's scientists aren't just building bombs. They are building a door.
Led by the sadistic necromancer Dr. Wolfram Kross, the SS Ahnenerbe are hunting for the Abramelin Vault—an ancient reservoir of power that can turn the souls of the dead into a weapon of mass destruction.
To stop them, Batty must lead a team of broken outcasts: a traumatized pilot with a death wish, a mathematician terrified of his own calculations, and Fenella Nightshade—the seductive, dangerous apothecary who holds Batty's heart (and her supply of poisons) in her cool hands.
From the fog-bound lighthouses of Scotland to the concrete belly of a Berlin Flak Tower, Batty must race to break the code before Kross opens the gate to Hell.
History is written by the victors. But the war is won in the dark.
