With help from the witch Beatrice, Shannon has enjoyed a budding romance with George Ushiromiya, her master's eldest grandson. As a servant of the Ushiromiya estate, Shannon is little more than furniture, but since her bargain with Beatrice, Shannon has never felt happier...or more human. Her brother and fellow servant, Kanon, is troubled by his sister's reliance on the with to reach beyond her lowly status. But when love begins to flutter in Kanon's heart, will he be tempted to abandon his station and take the witch's hand as well?

Each year, the Ushiromiya family gathers at the secluded mansion of its patriarch, the elderly Kinzo. It has been six years since Battler joined his cousins at the annual event, but their happy reunion is overshadowed by worsening weather and an eerie premonition from his youngest cousin-not to mention their parents' feud over the inheritance. Battler doesn't hold much stock in dark omens, nor does he believe the tales of the witch rumored to have given his grandfather a fortune in gold...and who walks the halls of the mansion to this day... But when the eighteen family members and servants are trapped on the island by the raging typhoon, the grisly events that follow leave Battler shaken to his core. Is one of his relatives desperate enough to kill for the family fortune? Or is this the work of the Golden Witch?

Tansy Trehearn was born and bred in the beautiful and little Cornish port of the village St. Ruthyn, where Martin Wyde was opening a small hotel, The Seagull's Cry. Tansy was falling in love with her employer Martin. She had never been so bewildered, she had met the one man she could ever love, and found that she had to fight her own sister in order to get him. And that was when she learned that the cry of the seagull was no more sad and tortured than the cry of her own heart. Because while Martin and Tansy's love softly flowered, several people were plotting to ruin their newfound happiness.

Six people are dead, and Battler and his remaining relatives slowly come around to addressing the terrifying reality of their situation: Either one of their number is a murderer, or there is a nineteenth person on the island who wants the Ushiromiya family dead. Regardless, the killer seems to be following the inscription beneath the portrait of Beatrice, the instructions for finding the elder Ushiromiya's vast treasure of gold. But each line of the inscription calls for more death, more blood...and the revival of the witch Beatrice herself... Will any remain alive to see the end of this mystery?

As detective-and-witch Erika targets all logical errors, Battler charges in head-on as their duel reaches its end. The relationships between Jouji and Shannon, Jessica and Kanon, as well as Battler and Beatrice are also put to the test!

Life itself could never have been sustainable without seabirds. As Adam Nicolson writes: "They are bringers of fertility, the deliverers of life from ocean to land." A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and NYT best-selling author Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed. The seabird’s cry comes from an elemental layer in the story of the world. Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on featureless seas, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Only the poets in the past would have thought of seabirds as creatures riding the ripples and currents of the entire planet, but that is what the scientists are seeing now today.