In Carthage, TX, assistant funeral director Bernie Tiede is one of the town's most beloved residents. He sings in the church choir and is always willing to lend a helping hand. He befriends an affluent widow, and she soon becomes dependent on Bernie. Later it is reported that Marjorie Nugent has been dead for some time, and Bernie Tiede is charged with the murder.

For months, Doctor Rowan Dupont has been staring death in the face. It followed her back to her hometown of Winchester, Tennessee, ten months ago, cloaking the walls of her family's Victorian funeral home like a shroud. In investigating the mysterious deaths of her loved ones, Rowan has unearthed enough family secrets to bury everything she'd previously thought true. But each shocking discovery has only led to more bodies and more questions; the rabbit...

1869. One of Victorian London's most respected undertakers, Violet Harper has the new duty of accompanying coffins from various undertakers on the London Necropolis Railway for respectful funerals and burials in Surrey. But on her fateful first trip, the mournful silence of the train is shattered by the shrill ringing of a coffin bell--a device that prevents a person from being buried alive. Inside the noisome coffin Violet finds a man wide-eyed with...

1869. While on a much-needed respite with her husband Sam in Nottinghamshire, undertaker Violet Harper is summoned to Welbeck Abbey by the Fifth Duke of Portland to prepare a body. His Grace is known as the "mad duke," and Violet has more than an inkling of why when she arrives at the grand estate and discovers that the corpse in question is that of the duke's favorite raven, Aristotle. Many of the duke's servants believe a dead raven is a harbinger...

Elizabeth Meyer stumbled upon a career in the midst of planning her own father's funeral, which she turned into an upbeat party with Rolling Stones music, thousands of dollars worth of her mother's favorite flowers, and a personalized eulogy. Starting out as a receptionist, Meyer quickly found she had a knack for helping people cope with their grief, as well as creating fitting send-offs for some of the city's most high-powered residents. Meyer has...

After her father's murder, Rowan Dupont returns to Winchester, Tennessee, to run her family's funeral home, where she tries to stop an obsessive serial killer and reconsiders her mother's and sister's earlier deaths.

Forty-two-year-old Shelley Marino's desperate yearning for a child has led her to one of the only doors still open to her: foreign adoption. It is a decision that strains and ultimately shatters her relationship with her husband, Martin—the veteran of an Asian war who cannot reconcile what Shelley wants with what he knows about the world. But it unites her with Mai, who emigrated from Vietnam decades ago and has now acquired the accoutrements

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After a vicious outlaw takes over a peaceful frontier town, an undertaker must choose between profits and survival in this gritty western.

Daigo Kobayashi is a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved and finds himself without a job. He decides to move back to his old hometown with his wife to look for work and start over. He answers a classified ad entitled 'Departures' thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency. He discovers that the job is actually for a 'Nokanshi' or 'encoffineer, ' a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry...

"The Beirut Hellfire Society is a short and brilliant return to the world Rawi Hage first imagined in his extraordinary, award-winning first novel De Niro's Game, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Award, an international bestseller, finalist for the Giller, GG, and Writers' Trust, and widely considered a Canadian classic. Since publishing De Niro's Game more than a decade ago, Hage has followed up with two award-winning and acclaimed novels set in Montreal's...