It's been nearly a year since the Epidemic, nearly a year since the dead began to walk, and civilization is finally getting back to business as usual.

With each undead "incident," teams from the US Office of Dead Validation are dispatched, bodies destroyed, and outbreaks efficiently contained. Science claims to have the answers to the bacteria that produced the panic, cultural attitudes toward death have adapted, and flesh-eating ghouls rarely pre-empt prime time television.

But for Lieutenant Owen and his Dead Validation squad in Portland, Oregon, things are not as under control as they seem to the public at large. Coping with a sudden rise in zombie speed and intelligence, evidence of an underground dead trade, death-worshipping cults, and personal drama centering around the Office's own personnel, sinister developments threaten to plunge emerging peace firmly back into bloody crisis.