The dead require more paperwork than the living. But what happens when the paperwork is a lie?For twenty-two years, Cora Jessup has maintained the Darrow County Public Cemetery with the exact same precision her father taught her. But when a record-breaking flood displaces three caskets in the old river section, the water gives back a secret that was never meant to surface. Opening the casket of Annette Flood-a woman who supposedly died in a tragic house fire twenty-six years ago-Cora finds remains that are too tall and too heavy to belong to the woman on the nameplate.
Worse, the official burial permit was signed and authorized by Cora's own father, the former cemetery superintendent. As Cora begins to pull at the threads of a decades-old cover-up, she discovers dual death certificates, fabricated dental records, and a grieving widower who has spent twenty years collecting a dead woman's pension. But Wade Flood isn't just a mastermind of financial abuse and domestic manipulation; he is a man who knows how to use leverage.
And the closer Cora gets to the truth of whose bones are actually in the liar's grave, the more Wade threatens to expose a devastating professional secret of Cora's own.
The dead require more paperwork than the living. But what happens when the paperwork is a lie?For twenty-two years, Cora Jessup has maintained the Darrow County Public Cemetery with the exact same precision her father taught her. But when a record-breaking flood displaces three caskets in the old river section, the water gives back a secret that was never meant to surface. Opening the casket of Annette Flood-a woman who supposedly died in a tragic house fire twenty-six years ago-Cora finds remains that are too tall and too heavy to belong to the woman on the nameplate.
Worse, the official burial permit was signed and authorized by Cora's own father, the former cemetery superintendent. As Cora begins to pull at the threads of a decades-old cover-up, she discovers dual death certificates, fabricated dental records, and a grieving widower who has spent twenty years collecting a dead woman's pension. But Wade Flood isn't just a mastermind of financial abuse and domestic manipulation; he is a man who knows how to use leverage.
And the closer Cora gets to the truth of whose bones are actually in the liar's grave, the more Wade threatens to expose a devastating professional secret of Cora's own.