After his father's sudden death, a high school student takes over the 400-year-old family business – an unusual pawnshop that trades goods between this world and the next. As he investigates his father's death, he probes the shop's deepest mysteries, and acquires first-hand knowledge of the spirit world.

When his father dies unexpectedly in his pawnshop, seventeen-year-old Chieh has to take up the reins of a business that has been in the family for eight generations. By tradition, the pawnshop only opens at night, and this is just one of many unusual rules of operation. Occupying a narrow, run-down storefront, the shop boasts a massive underground storage room for pawned goods: everything from clothing to motorcycles to Ming dynasty antiques to… astrological birth charts. Like the store, the customers also have hidden depths, and, according to the rules, Chieh must uncover the real reasons behind their visits before they can redeem their pawned items.

From there, things only get more bizarre. The dark shades that haunt the shop seem to be looking for someone… could it be the proprietor? But Chieh's father is already dead… After a Daoist priest fails to exorcise the spirits, Chieh uncovers what he believes is the real reason for the hauntings in the pawnshop's ancient records.

Meanwhile, a police detective discovers that a series of seemingly ordinary deaths in an elder care facility may have actually been murders. Three years after turning himself in, the killer was executed, but the items he stole from his elderly victims are all still in hock at Chieh's shop, and the killer was a friend of Chieh's father…

With one foot planted in the mind-bending world of the supernatural, and the other in the legal and psychological realities that follow the death of a loved one, The Otherworld Pawnshop illustrates what it takes to get through tough times, and what it means to die well. Packed with family secrets and folk superstition, this coming-of-age/supernatural mystery mashup will charm readers with its distinctive characters, dry humor, and otherworldly suspense.