Carrie Lisbon Mystery

Undertakers know a lot of things... Carrie Lisbon knows how to dress a body, what kinds of flowers to use in funerary tributes, and which embalming preparations are best. What she doesn't know is how to navigate the social strata of Hope Bridge, the small town she now calls home. Looking to escape the outdated and elaborate turn of the century mourning rituals that do nothing but fuel her anger about her husband's passing, Carrie moves to a village dominated by a rickety covered bridge, a social scene bent on keeping the status quo, and a sense of lawlessness that undermines her frail equilibrium. When she's called to lay out the body of a young woman, Carrie discovers brutal injuries that contradict the husband's story about his wife's death. Instead of being accepted as a professional, and as someone who knows what she's talking about, she's rebuffed by the town's undertaker, dismissed by the sheriff, and pursued by the dead woman's husband. Desperate to clear a friend of murder, Carrie finds few leads, but uncovers Hope Bridge's sadistic family secrets. Thwarted by ambiguity and indifference, she struggles with a dubious telephone system, her newcomer status, and multiple town intrigues in order to gain her place and catch a killer.

'There's a body! Down by the bridge!' It's November 1900 in rural Hope Bridge, New York. The town is bustling with the chaos of construction workers, steam engines, and horse-drawn wagons as a new iron trestle rises over the Duncan Creek. Amid the clamor, the body of the bridge builder is discovered, plunging the community into shock. Undertaker Carrie Lisbon is once again summoned by Sheriff Delphius Morgan to act as his 'keen observer.' She has a knack for solving the problems of the dead. She's good at what she does: embalming and laying out bodies, arranging funeral flowers, taking mortuary photographs, and keeping big secrets buried deep. With Election Day just a week away, Carrie and Morgan's unconventional partnership is targeted by Morgan's rival for sheriff, a slick interloper who's running a dirty campaign, and thinks there's more to Carrie and Del's relationship than just a dead body. As if a murder case and political turmoil isn't enough, Morgan's teenage son, Eddie, goes missing. When Carrie teams up with Morgan's steadfast deputy, a scrappy kid from the town dump, and an unlikely ally, they tease out clues to the murder while they search for Eddie. But as personal and political pressures mount, and she gets closer to identifying the killer, those big secrets threaten to become unburied, and Carrie has to make some hard choices to keep them where they are.

A death at the county poorhouse is unremarkable in 1900. Unless the corpse presents as a drowning victim and there is no water on the property. Widowed undertaker Carrie Lisbon has traveled to Duncan, the county seat, to attend the Annual Sheriff's Benefit Ball. But before the country hoe-down can begin, Sheriff Del Morgan asks her again to be his "keen observer" as he examines the body of Abbey Taylor, a resident of the county home whose death is more than a little suspect. At the heart of the mystery is the county poorhouse and its shadowy past, a bitter matron, an oily administrator, and a young bride, all of whom have something to hide. Under a withering August heat wave, Carrie and Del pursue meager pieces of the puzzle. Their search for answers leads them to a clan of noble miscreants who live in the hills, through a tangle of genealogies and tragic histories, and brings them way too close to each other. Along with her gangly Uncle Sav, his half-blind cousin Grace, and Marta, the beautiful and disgraced almshouse drudge, Carrie will grapple with a deadly illness, her own guilty conscience, and a new set of social trials as she decides the fate of her relationship with Morgan and discovers what really happened to Abbey Taylor. She'll need all her wits to survive the outcome.