The novel follows three sisters, Tess, Kate, and Leah Fox, whose lives are permanently altered when Tess is seven and Kate is five. While staying with their sick grandmother in upstate New York, Tess looks into a fire and sees their parents’ car hit black ice before anyone knows the accident has happened; Kate, whose supernatural ability moves in the opposite direction, can see into the past. Their much older sister Leah is eighteen and already has a complicated relationship with the family because she remembers their father as an alcoholic, unreliable man, whereas Tess and Kate knew the sober version who returned to their mother and started a second family. After their parents die, Leah abandons college and becomes responsible for both little girls and their dying grandmother. When the grandmother dies, Leah uses her own kind of witchcraft, based on herbs, ritual, objects, bodily materials, and spells, to make Tess and Kate’s powers manageable by binding their visions to fire. Tess can look forward, Kate can look backward, and Leah can manipulate the present. Leah soon realizes that the three abilities can make money. They become traveling confidence women, beginning with small scams and séances before progressing to bankers, businessmen, addicts, financiers, and other wealthy targets. Kate pretends that dead people speak through her while using real knowledge of the past; Tess provides accurate glimpses of what is going to happen; Leah manipulates circumstances with magic. Tess eventually develops a political justification for what they do. She has seen a horrifying distant future of drought, destruction, climate catastrophe, and extreme inequality, and she convinces herself that ruining powerful, exploitative rich people is a way to fight the system that will eventually destroy the world. When Kate turns eighteen, Leah abruptly announces that they have enough money and that she is finished. She wants them all to live ordinary adult lives. Tess feels that Leah created them as criminals and then abandoned them, and she never forgives her. Tess and Kate continue together until Kate becomes obsessed with one of their marks, Charlie Livermore, heir to a hotel fortune. Charlie’s beloved young wife died suddenly of pneumonia, and Kate is originally supposed to exploit his grief by pretending to channel her. Instead, she becomes his personal medium for three years and even sexually inhabits the role of his dead wife for him. Kate falls deeply in love with Charlie, while Tess sees the relationship as an addiction. The sisters become estranged. Eventually Charlie gets engaged to Aarthi Schwartzkopf, a younger art historian, and the devastated Kate returns to Tess.
Kate proposes one last major con. Their target is Cornelius Roenfeldt, the eighty-year-old head of Glamis Global Capital, a private-equity empire built through inherited wealth, oil and gas deals, leveraged acquisitions, and the destruction of other companies. Cornelius’s first wife, the mother of his children, has recently died. His youngest daughter Daphne has heard of Kate and wants to give her father a séance. Kate and Tess construct an elaborate plan: Kate will convince Cornelius that she can communicate with his dead wife and dead financiers, while Tess will infiltrate the life of Cornelius’s son William. Eventually they want Cornelius to leave Glamis entirely to William. After Cornelius dies, Tess intends to use her knowledge of the future to persuade William to leverage Glamis and the Roenfeldt fortune on a catastrophic investment, destroying the empire. Kate returns to the sisters’ old house and enters the past of Mrs. Roenfeldt, learning intimate secrets that could not have been found through ordinary research. Tess invents a new identity, Jennifer “Jenny” Morgan, a wealthy-seeming predictive-analytics consultant. She stages encounters with William until he believes fate keeps bringing them together. At Cornelius’s eightieth-birthday party at the family’s enormous Newport estate, The Bells, Kate performs a séance, reveals private memories, and gives Cornelius one of Tess’s accurate market predictions. When the prediction makes him millions, Cornelius becomes fascinated by Kate and increasingly dependent on her supposed messages from the dead. Tess begins dating William. He is decent and gentle compared with his father but also protected by wealth to the point of naivety, and he instinctively treats Tess as someone who need not concern herself with serious business. More dangerously, Tess develops genuine sexual and emotional chemistry with Jacob Van Dusen, Cornelius’s former stepson and a senior Glamis employee. Jacob belongs to the Roenfeldt world while remaining slightly outside it, and unlike William he is suspicious, perceptive, and difficult for Tess to manipulate. Nevertheless, Tess continues playing Jenny and becomes engaged to William, accepting the emerald ring that belonged to his mother.
The con begins falling apart because Kate has hidden why she chose the Roenfeldts in the first place. Charlie is an old friend of William, Daphne, and Jacob, so remaining at The Bells allows Kate to remain close to him. Charlie and Kate secretly begin sleeping together, even though Charlie is still engaged to Aarthi, and Charlie tells Kate he loves her. Meanwhile Cornelius suffers a stroke before the estate plan is complete. Kate secretly contacts Leah, revealing that she has never been as fully estranged from their older sister as Tess believed. Leah gives her instructions that help Cornelius survive. After his recovery, Kate exploits his new fear of death and persuades him that the spirits want his fortune consolidated under William. Cornelius eventually signs the new will. Tess, however, is furious about Kate and Charlie. She tries to use Leah-style witchcraft to separate them, creating a spell meant to wash Charlie’s obsession away in open water. Instead, in a moment of anger, she dumps the potion into a hospital toilet. Soon afterward Charlie disappears completely. His passport and wallet are left behind, his family reports him missing, and Jacob begins to suspect that Kate has harmed him. Tess realizes her badly performed spell may literally have removed or killed Charlie. At the same time, Tess drugs Daphne with an herbal mixture to prevent her interfering with the will signing, and Daphne has terrifying dreams about dead bodies, including Charlie.
