Nearly brand new. Non-smoking no animals house. Phone calls at half past dawn are never a good omen for Anita Blake - and this one proves no exception. Larry Kirkland, her Animator’s Inc. coworker, has a pregnant wife in early labor and needs Anita to cover for him on an assignment. The deceased is a federal witness who dies in FBI protective custody before he could testify; a judge has ruled the witness can be raised as a zombie, and his testimony taken posthumously. For anyone else, this would be a piece of cake. But Anita is afraid to fly - and the graveyard is in Philadelphia. And there’s the nasty problem of being apart from her lover’s for so long, forcing her to feed the ardeur - the lust hunger that still drives her - with some hapless stranger.