Traveling through Wyoming Clint Adams encounters a man in a huge wagon, being drawn by two Clydesdales. The diminutive Brit is accosted in a saloon, and after Clint steps in to save him, the man asks Clint to join him on what is a new business venture. He tells Clint that he is a traveling undertaker. Although he's dubious about the undertaking, Clint agrees to travel for a short time with the man, to see just what he does. As it turns out, something else is going on, and after they part ways, Clint must find out what that something is--if he can stay alive to do it.
The Undertaker has been a name synonymous with professional wrestling's elite for close to three decades. He has inspired millions, created countless memories and carved out a celebrated legacy with his fearsome presence and unmatched in-ring ability. From humble beginnings in World Class Championship Wrestling, to the heady heights of World Wrestling Entertainment, it is time to delve into the life and career of, 'The Grim Reaper', and revisit every championship reign, every classic storyline and every battle with the likes of Yokozuna, Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Giant Gonzalez, Brock Lesnar and many more. The dead are calling. The bell tolls. Prepare for a trip down Death Valley.
Undertaker Jonas Crow is charged with transporting the coffin of an ex-miner become millionaire back to the mining vein that made his fortune. The funeral should have been a calm affair, but there's an unexpected turn of events: on the eve of his death, Joe Cusco swallowed all his gold, so as to carry it with him for all eternity. Unfortunately, the secret was leaked, provoking the fury of all the miners of Anoki City. They can't just leave such a fortune to be buried while they're sweating their souls away in the mining shafts! As Jonas says, "death never comes alone..."
A thrilling novel from #1 international bestselling author Sara Blaedel, author of The Forgotten Girls "One of the best I've come across." -- Michael Connelly "Sara Blaedel is a force to be reckoned with. She's a remarkable crime writer who time and again delivers a solid, engaging story that any reader in the world can enjoy." -- Karin Slaughter "One can count on emotional engagement, spine-tingling suspense, and taut storytelling from Sara Blaedel." -- Sandra Brown Already widowed by the age of forty, Ilka Nichols Jensen, a school portrait photographer, leads a modest, regimented, and uneventful life in Copenhagen. Until unexpected news rocks her quiet existence: Her father--who walked out suddenly and inexplicably on the family more than three decades ago--has died. And he's left her something in his will: his funeral home. In Racine, Wisconsin. Clinging to this last shred of communication from the father she hasn't heard from since childhood, Ilka makes an uncharacteristically rash decision and jumps on a plane to Wisconsin. Desperate for a connection to the parent she never really knew, she plans to visit the funeral home and go through her father's things--hoping for some insight into his new life in America--before preparing the business for a quick sale. But when she stumbles on an unsolved murder, and a killer who seems to still be very much alive, the undertaker's daughter realizes she might be in over her head . . .
Though it has often been passionately criticized--as fraudulent, exploitative, even pagan--the American funeral home has become nearly as inevitable as death itself, an institution firmly embedded in our culture. But how did the funeral home come to hold such a position? What is its history? And is it guilty of the charges sometimes leveled against it? In Rest in Peace, Gary Laderman traces the origins of American funeral rituals, from the evolution of embalming techniques during and after the Civil War and the shift from home funerals to funeral homes at the turn of the century, to the increasing subordination of priests, ministers, and other religious figures to the funeral director throughout the twentieth century. In doing so he shows that far from manipulating vulnerable mourners, as Jessica Mitford claimed in her best-selling The American Way of Death (1963), funeral directors are highly respected figures whose services reflect the community's deepest needs and wishes. Indeed, Laderman shows that funeral directors generally give the people what they want when it is time to bury our dead. He reveals, for example, that the open casket, often criticized as barbaric, provides a deeply meaningful moment for friends and family who must say goodbye to their loved one. But he also shows how the dead often come back to life in the popular imagination to disturb the peace of the living. Drawing upon interviews with funeral directors, major historical events like the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Rudolf Valentino, films, television, newspaper reports, proposals for funeral reform, and other primary sources, Rest in Peace cuts through the rhetoric to show us the reality--and the real cultural value--of the American funeral.
'On the last day of 1959 my father, the Beau Brummel of morticians, piled us into his green and white Desoto in which we looked like a moving pack of Salem cigarettes. He drove away from Lanesboro, the city in which we all were born, and into a small town on the Kentucky and Tennessee border. It was only a ninety-minute drive, but it might as well have been to Alaska. When our big boat of a car glided into Jubilee we circled the town square and headed towards the residential section of Main Street. My father pulled the car over and our five dark heads turned to face a huge, slightly run down house. My parents were total strangers to this tiny enclave, but it didn't matter because my father had finally realised his dream in this old house, which was to own his own funeral home.'
A graveyard feast beneath the summer moon … The rural town of Old Hickory. Tennessee was a quiet, picturesque community … until the O'Sheas came to town. Becoming the new proprietors of the town's only funeral parlor, with the help of their charming patriarch, Square McManus, the Irish family was wholeheartedly accepted by the local townfolk. The thing began to happen. Strange things … horrible, unspeakable things … in the dead of night. The sighting of wolfish beasts congregating around an open grave in the town cemetery. Frightening changes in several of Old Hickory's less desirable residents. And the brutal murder and devouring of a varsity football player in the wooded wilderness outside of town. Soon, what was once concealed in shadow and secrecy was now starkly revealed, in all its ravenous fury, by the silvery light of the full moon. As the residents of Old Hickory, as well as the local police, begin to fall victim to an unknown evil, four individuals—the town nerd, a high school jock, a widowed gunsith, and a mysterious transient from a distant shore—find themselves facing what could possibly be a hellish lycanthrope from ancient Ireland … the legendary Arget Bethir … the Silver Beast.
An enthralling novel of historical fiction for fans of Lisa Wingate and Ellen Marie Wiseman, The Undertaker’s Assistant is a powerful story of human resilience set during Reconstruction-era New Orleans that features an extraordinary and unforgettable heroine at its heart. “The dead can’t hurt you. Only the living can.” Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies—and to forget what is too painful to bear. Now a young freedwoman, she has returned south to New Orleans and earns her living as an embalmer, her steady hand and skillful incisions compensating for her white employer’s shortcomings. Tall and serious, Effie keeps her distance from the other girls in her boarding house, holding tight to the satisfaction she finds in her work. But despite her reticence, two encounters—with a charismatic state legislator named Samson Greene, and a beautiful young Creole, Adeline—introduce her to new worlds of protests and activism, of soirees and social ambition. Effie decides to seek out the past she has blocked from her memory and try to trace her kin. As her hopes are tested by betrayal, and New Orleans grapples with violence and growing racial turmoil, Effie faces loss and heartache, but also a chance to finally find her place . . .
