This delightfully eerie cozy mystery follows the adventures of Delia Sanchez, a streetwise ex-cop with a disabled arm and a desperate need for a new start. When she drops in on an open house for the sale of the rundown Loring Mansion in Santa Clotilde, California, she thinks she's discovered just such a start in the enormous 1920s Tudor house with its hand-plastered walls, Tudor-arched doorways, and miles of antique oak plank floors.

Complications immediately arise, though, when she discovers that the house is not actually for sale. In fact, the late owner of the Loring Mansion left it in trust to her two cats. The open house is only offering the purchase of a tenancy of the Loring Mansion-a tenancy that will only go to someone who agrees to care for the two feline beneficiaries of the previous owner's will for the next ten years! Oh, and did I mention that cats terrify Delia? But unable to face returning to her previous life, she agrees to the unthinkable, impossibility of the condition.

Things are settled and she moves in...only to find that the malevolent ghost of the past owner still occupies the house. And then there's a sadistic ex-boyfriend of the injured stranger she agrees to harbor on the decrepit old estate...