North Hampton has settled back into something like quiet, and the Beauchamps are enjoying it. Then Freya's twin brother Freddie walks back into town. He has escaped from Limbo, where he was sent for destroying the bridge between worlds, and he says he did not do it. He says Killian Gardiner did, and he wants Freya to help him prove it before he takes his revenge.
Freya is engaged to Killian. She agrees to keep Freddie hidden, even from their mother, and spends the autumn caught between the two of them, trying to find out which one is lying to her. Ingrid, meanwhile, has a first proper romance with Matt Noble, the town detective, which becomes complicated when a case he is working on starts to lead back towards her family. And Joanna is being contacted by a spirit that will not identify itself and will not leave her alone.
The second Beauchamp Family novel keeps the structure of the first, rotating between the three women and now Freddie as well, and moves the family from a summer of exposure into a colder season of suspicion. The mythology broadens: pixies, Limbo, the courts of the old gods, and the poison of the title, which is already circulating by the time anyone works out who released it.