The city of Ambergris is a place of vivid, terrible beauty, exhibiting sophisticated cruelties and dangers experienced as something approaching art. In the collection City of Saints and Madmen and the novels Shriek: An Afterword and Finch, secrets and obsessions play out on streets above a rising force of a people. In an Ambergris conquered and enslaved, a desperate man seeks the answers to both a crime that may be unsolvable and the troubling mystery of the future of the city itself.