SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!

This was excellent! A delightfully creepy and twisty novella that hits on every page. Amy Starr is taking on a new job for a crime lord called the Widower. The Widower rules an immense mobile city with an iron fist. Starr's job involves caring for the Widower's obsession, a ghoulish dancer. In this world the undead are a dangerous blasphemy. Ghouls are fast, lethal, and mostly stupid. But it's possible for them to mimic human behavior, even to talk, and down that path lies something worse than mere death.

Starr's first twist is that ghoul handler is a cover for her real job. She's an undercover cop, and if the Widower is harboring a Tier III or higher ghoul, the full force of the law will descend with all it's fury, which seems to start with napalm airstrike and escalate from there. The second twist is that the ghoul is Tier VI at least. Not only can it talk, but it can think. It's name is Lucy and it remembers Amy from somewhere.

The Widower starts a war with another gangster named Charlie and wins due to superior organization and firepower. As part of the truce, she invites Charlie and his men to a show with a very special guest. The curtain drops, the protective wire netting falls, and Lucy chews her way through a hundred armed men without any effort.

The last act reveals a new set of twists. The Widower and Lucy were once married. Lucy was another undercover cop, and Amy Starr's partner. And she turned herself into a ghoul, because no mere human could take down the Widower. This desperate plan would never work, it's impossible. Except that Amy Starr isn't Amy. She's the final stage, Tier Omega, a ghoul who can control her appetites and is riding herd on human and ghoul alike.

Taught, suprising, fantastically stylish. This might be the best thing Muir has written since Gideon the Ninth.