Terminal Objections

Death has been suspended. Unfortunately, nobody thought to suspend the paperwork.

When a celestial court issues an injunction against Death himself, the world discovers a horrifying loophole in the laws of existence: nobody can die.

Accident victims survive the impossible. The terminally ill remain trapped in failing bodies. Heaven and Hell refuse to accept new arrivals without the proper authorization. And somewhere in Manhattan, the Department of Unnatural Affairs is expected to sort out the mess.

For Director Victoria Hayes, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who thought she'd already encountered every conceivable form of institutional stupidity, this is a new level of administrative hell.

At the center of the crisis is Benjamin Thorne, an eighteenth-century attorney whose centuries-old legal grievance has brought the machinery of mortality to a grinding halt. With Death legally forbidden from performing his duties, Victoria and her increasingly overworked department must navigate celestial court proceedings, infernal investigations, ancient legal technicalities, and a bureaucracy that makes the federal government look positively efficient.

Fortunately, Victoria has a capable assistant, a collection of deeply peculiar colleagues, and Barnaby, a goat whose appetite for important documents is rivaled only by his complete disregard for office protocol.

Unfortunately, none of them can simply order Death back to work.

As the consequences spread across the globe, Victoria must find a way to restore the natural order before a temporary legal dispute becomes a permanent catastrophe.

Because when the universe runs on paperwork, one bad ruling can be a matter of life and death.

Terminal Objections is the second installment in Morgan Ellery's Department of Unnatural Affairs, a darkly comic supernatural fantasy series where cosmic powers answer to administrative procedure, ancient grudges become modern legal disasters, and the end of the world might require three signatures and a notarized affidavit.