If Tipsy Collins learned one thing from her divorce, it’s that everyone in Charleston is a little crazy–even if they’re already dead.

Tipsy, a gifted artist, cannot ignore her nutty friends or her vindictive ex-husband, but as a lifelong reluctant clairvoyant, she has always avoided dead people. When Tipsy and her three children move into the house on Bennett Street, she realizes that some ghosts won’t be ignored.

Till death do us part didn’t pan out for Jane and Henry Mott, who have haunted the house for nearly a century. Tipsy’s marriage was downright felicitous when compared to Jane and Henry’s ill-fated union. Jane believes Henry killed her and then himself, and Henry vehemently denies both accusations. Unfortunately, neither phantom remembers that afternoon in 1923.

Tipsy doesn’t know whether to side with Jane, who seems to be hiding something under her Southern belle charm, or Henry, a mercurial creative genius. Jane and Henry draw Tipsy into their conundrum, and she uncovers secrets long concealed under layers of good manners, broken promises, and soupy Lowcountry air.

Living with ghosts, however, takes a toll on her health and possibly even her sanity. As she struggles to forge a new path for herself and her children, Tipsy has a chance to set Jane and Henry free–and release the ghosts of her own past.

Clairvoyant single mom Tipsy Collins is easing into a post-divorce new normal.

She has solved a century-old murder mystery and brought peace to her house. She’s rebuilding her artistic career and coparenting with her ornery ex-husband. She’s hopeful that her boyfriend is Mr. Right. Mercurial phantom Henry Mott still haunts her house, but he’s become a dear friend. Tipsy plans to return to her lifelong habit of ignoring restless spirits.

A series of sudden financial and personal setbacks leave her feeling like she’s back to square one, until a new friendship offers unexpected financial salvation. Ivy More has been haunting a Sullivan’s Island cottage since the 1940s. Ivy’s eccentric granddaughter, Pamella Brewton, will pay big bucks if Tipsy can figure out how to free her moody, volatile Meemaw. It turns out there was more to Ivy’s death than a simple swan dive off the dock at low tide. To complicate matters, Ivy had a secret lover. Shockingly, he’s someone Tipsy has seen before.

As Tipsy struggles with heartbreak, her ex-husband’s shenanigans, and a growing sense of frustration with life, she turns to Henry for help solving Ivy’s mystery. She finds herself learning from her brooding housemate but also from Ivy, who has far more in common with Tipsy than either of them expect.

When Eleanor Brice loses a glass slipper, she unexpectedly gains a royal fiance and a way out of her abusive stepmother’s house. Unfortunately, eight years of mistreatment, isolation, and clandestine book learning hardly prepared Eleanor for life at Eclatant Palace, where women are seen, not heard. According to Eleanor’s eavesdropping parrot, no one at court appreciates her unladylike tendency to voice her opinion. To make matters worse, Gregory Desmarais, Crown Prince of Cartheigh, spends his last night of bachelorhood on a drunken whoring spree. Before the ink dries on her marriage proclamation, Eleanor realizes she loves her husband’s best friend, the intellectual, surprisingly sensitive former soldier, Dorian Finley. As Gregory’s mercurial nature comes to light, Eleanor wrestles with her feelings for Dorian, flounders in her new role, and makes powerful enemies–foes who use Eleanor as a scapegoat in a magical plot to unseat the royal family.

Eleanor Brice is a princess. She lives in an enchanted castle. She even has her own unicorn. But she’s lived through childhood trauma, she has insecurities and anxieties, and she makes dreadful relationship choices. In short, she’s a real woman in a fairy tale world, and this is her happily-ever-after.

Eleanor Brice Desmarais, she of the cracked glass slipper and unladylike intellectual propensities, has learned that happily-ever-after is as rare as a frozen dragon, even for a happenstance princess. She survived a plot against her life, but her marriage to the alcoholic, womanizing Prince Gregory of Cartheigh remains at best a sham, and at worse, a potential noose around her neck. Gregory is increasingly suspicious of Eleanor’s unusually close relationship with his best friend, Dorian Finley, and with good reason. Ironically, Gregory seems to be engaged in his own scandalous love affair—with Eleanor’s scheming stepsister, no less. Eleanor understands the harsh realities of women’s lives in her kingdom, so she turns her energies to a school for impoverished girls, until an evil magician’s deception destroys the school and unleashes a festering plague. From the fire-iron walls of Eclatant Palace to the slums of Meggett Fringe, no one, magical or mundane, is safe from the fever-induced delirium of the Great Burning. Not even Eleanor’s children.

As Eleanor’s happily-ever-after morphs from circumspect to heartbreaking to mortally dangerous, for both herself and Dorian, she faces her greatest losses and her harshest reckoning. No matter what life hands her, however, she finds the strength to do what she must. She stares down her challenges, protects her loved ones, and fights to change the world. Just like women everywhere, in her world and ours.

Four years have passed since Eleanor Brice Desmarais’s darkest secret came to heartbreaking, perilous light. The princess with the cracked glass slipper still mourns unimaginable losses, including the deaths of her son and her best friend. Her lover, Dorian Finley, is in exile in a far northern kingdom. Eleanor and her husband, Crown Prince Gregory of Cartheigh, barely tolerate one another. Her two daughters are the bright stars in what feels like an existence of endless night.

Husband and wife travel north on an unexpected diplomatic mission, and Eleanor, Dorian, and Gregory resume their dangerous love triangle, with continued interference from Eleanor’s wily stepsister. Eleanor’s old nemesis, Ezra Oliver, forms a mysterious alliance with an army of vicious, bloodthirsty ogres, pushing Cartheigh to the brink of war. His magical finagling exposes strange connections between Eleanor’s world and our own, and places her precocious, enigmatic daughter, Natalie, in terrible danger. When Gregory suddenly finds himself king, he leans on Dorian and Eleanor’s counsel. With a fledgling monarch on the throne and the enemy amassing in the north, the unlikely triad must unite for the good of the kingdom. Their shared purpose forces Eleanor to rethink years of grudges, resentment, and animosity. As she truly embraces her own power, she finds herself learning to forgive, and asking for forgiveness.

The long-awaited conclusion to Stephanie Alexander’s Cracked Slipper series brings a satisfying resolution to a beloved fairytale. Eleanor’s surprisingly relatable enchanted life is a testament to the power of personal evolution, and a reminder that there are no simple happy endings.