When Maddie and Rick Asher, a psychiatrist and an ER doctor, buy their first home at 13 Morgue Street in Baltimore, they expect the usual headaches of homeownership. What they don't expect is Edgar Allan Poe. Maddie discovers the dead poet—now a sardonic, melodramatic, and profoundly bored poltergeist—has been stuck in limbo for the past hundred and seventy-one years and is now haunting their new house. In order to help the father of the modern detective story finally move on the afterlife, Maddie teams up with Poe to solve a mystery. What follows is an investigation that is one part gothic thriller and three parts spirited comedy.