In March of 1961 five people arrive in Kirkston by the evening train, with fourteen crates following by freight. They buy the undertaker's house at the top of Corbin Hill — Federal, brick, five bays, a carriage house of unusual depth — from heirs who are settled in California, embarrassed by the property, and glad of a buyer who does not ask to have the history explained.

Ambrose Danvry keeps the journal, as he has kept it at every arrival for longer than the book has pages to remember. His family has done this for three thousand years. They come into a town, they take the trade, and they set about the work of retrieval — and what they retrieve does not stop.

Told in journals across fifty-eight years: an ancient family in the funeral trade, a stable of the conscious dead, and one retrieval that is too good.