The setting is the fictional Yorkchester Cemetery, where Jonathan Rebeck, a homeless and bankrupt pharmacist who has dropped out of society, has been living, illegally and unobtrusively, for nearly two decades.

Beagle portrays ghosts as being bound to the vicinity of their burial, with their minds and memories slowly fading away as their mortal forms return to the dust.

As the plot proceeds, Rebeck befriends two recently arrived spirits, those of teacher Michael Morgan, who died either from poisoning by his wife or suicide (he cannot remember which), and of bookshop clerk Laura Durand, who was killed by a truck.

The quiet existence of this unlikely quintet is diverted by philosophical conversation and the poisoning trial of Morgan's wife, word of which is regularly provided by the raven from the local newspapers.

After she is ultimately found innocent and her husband's death ruled suicide, Morgan faces separation from Laura when his body is removed to unhallowed ground.

In The New York Times, Orville Prescott called it "a first novel of considerable charm and much promise," noting its originality, "combination of wistful melancholy and tart humor," and "smooth, precise, graceful prose, bright with wit and sparkling with imaginative phrases."

"[3] While a month later, Edmund Fuller characterized the book as "a striking debut on several counts," possessed of "wit, charm and individuality–with a sense of style notable in a first novel."

He disliked what he saw as tendencies to "occasional strident, inappropriate, irrelevant vulgarism" and sentimentality, and viewed the portrayed "philosophical concept of death [as] shallow."