A story of Odd Thomas at St. Bartholomew's Abbey hoping to learn to live fully again and among the eccentric monks, their guests, and the nuns and young students of the attached convent school. But, trouble has a way of finding Odd Thomas, and it slinks back onto his path in the form of the sinister bodachs he has met previously, the black shades who herald death and disaster and who come late one December night to hover above the abbey's most precious charges.