The Calloway women are notorious for three things: Olympic-level banter, an inexplicable fear of dolls, and secrets. 

And one of these things is going to get them killed.

When Aster Calloway’s mother, Poppy, announces that she’s running for mayor, Aster chalks it up to a desire to parent the town into submission—a technique that worked so well with Aster. Yet, when this perennial screw-up realizes there might be a way to keep the worst of her sins secret by helping her mother win the election before she starts a new life for herself far, far away, Aster jumps at the chance. All she has to do is nick her Gran’s Fabergé music box and sell it to the highest bidder… little realizing that Gran’s house of lies is about to come tumbling down.

Poppy Calloway knows she has no business running for mayor. After all, she’s just a single mom with a cagey adult kid who can’t get her life on track…but she also can’t let her book-banning high school nemesis, the only other candidate, wreck the town that Poppy has worked so hard to keep alive. When a surprise $20,000 check appears in her mailbox, it should feel like salvation for her election bid, but a doll has arrived too… a harbinger of death in creepy Mary Janes. 

Iris Calloway burned her old life to the ground four decades ago. Now in her mid-sixties, no one would suspect that this antique-store owning, marathon-running grandmother was once a Soviet spy. And that’s how Iris likes it. She’d locked the door on that life, taking with her only a Fabergé music box containing a list of names hidden within its jewel-encrusted skeleton—names that protected her, her daughter, and her granddaughter. 

But the box is gone, and a doll is on the doorstep, which can only mean that the list is in play… and the three most dangerous spies in the world are on the hunt:

The one who broke her heart. 

The one who gave her Poppy. 

And the one who wants all the other spies, and especially those bickering Calloway women, dead.