Thursday's hopes for a quiet life with her new husband, Landen, are dashed when a seemingly impossible string of coincidences involving a falling car, a disgruntled Neanderthal, and a mysterious young woman leads to some extremely close brushes with death. Her jumpy ChronoGuard father rescues her just in time, only to reveal to her that the world is destined to become one big, pink blob of Dream Topping in a matter of days unless they can figure out how and why it happens. And just when Thursday discovers that she is pregnant with Landen's child, the Goliath goons eradicate Landen from existence, threatening to make it permanent unless Thursday retrieves her nemesis Jack Schitt from his imprisonment in a copy of "The Raven"—this time without the help of her now retired uncle Mycroft's mad machinery. Thursday's loved ones are disappearing, while her list of enemies appears to be growing steadily.

Luckily, Thursday's fictional colleagues in an internal book-policing squad called Jurisfiction have eagerly anticipated her return to the book world, assigning her to apprentice under the tutelage of one of their greatest agents, the abrasive Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. Thursday discovers that the sudden materialization of Shakespeare's long-lost play Cardenio, which she had been investigating for SpecOps 27, was indeed too good to be true—it has evidently been stolen from the Great Library by a rogue character from the book world. With Miss Havisham and Jurisfiction's help, Thursday must find the perpetrator and return Cardenio to its proper home in the Well of Lost Plots—the home of all unpublished works—before the thief can gain all the power and money that goes with its release in the real world.