First Book: "A Manhattan Ghost Story": A photographer, Abner Cray, goes to NYC to work on a "coffee table photo book" about Manhattan and encounters, in the apartment he's renting, not only a woman, Phyllis Pellaprat, with whom he falls in love, and finds out halfway through the novel not only that she's dead but that the absent friend whose apartment he's using murdered her. Beyond that, he's been given the doubtful gift of "seeing" and interacting with hundreds of spirits that inhabit Manhattan. Second Book: "The Waiting Room": First-person narrator Sam Feary is one of Abner's lifelong friends and he's convinced that Abner, in his continuing quest for Phyllis Pellaprat--who's all-but left him entirely--will be lost forever in the world of the dead: he goes in search of Abner in many places throughout the northeast. His journey is as weird as Abner's in the previous book. Third Book: "A Spider on my Tongue": Abner, some twenty-five years older than when we previously heard from him--is living in a small house in the middle of dark woods somewhere in New York State. He's trying to escape the hold that the spirits of the dead (whom he now refers to as "the passing misery") have had on him for decades. He's convinced that Phyllis has still not left the earth entirely, and Sam Feary, as well, who has since died. Abner's first-person narration is very much a plea to be free of the clinging past and, at the same time, to continue to be part of it.