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An outcast punker named Grin barrels a pink hearse into Tombsville, Massachusetts, home of his family's Smile Cemetery and funeral home, for a preview of his grandfather's will. Relatives hunch like hungry vultures waiting for their dinner to die. A wild mystery ensues where greed and murder mingle with the supernatural, thanatology, and zombies. The novel's zombies aren't stereotypical lumps of walking clay. Yamaguchi's zombies have personalities, feelings, souls, can function, imitate the living, wax philosophical about life, and even solve murders (including their own). Of the more than thirty characters, some become zombies as the gap between the living and the dead gets smaller.
Bizarre characters with fully developed idiosyncrasies interact in a densely filamented but well-structured plot. The setup is long (about 200 pages), but the mystery plays out so well that it's well worth the wait for fans of the golden age of detective fiction. If Agatha Christie wrote about supernatural crimes in a cozy funeral parlor, Arthur Conan Doyle dropped acid, and John Dickson Carr specialized in tales of the undead, perhaps this would be the result. Although the plot is complex and quirky, Yamaguchi's writing is clear, clever, and meticulous. He has a handle on the history, philosophy, and future of the funeral industry, which lends credibility to this imaginative and entertaining brain teaser drizzled with thanatological gems such as the living "have come to depend on the dead," and a mortician is like an architect who builds "homes for the deceased."
Yamaguchi is famous in Japan as an author of shin honkaku mysteries, or "puzzle plot," locked-room mysteries that have all the clues in place for the crimes to be solved. Readers will not be disappointed by this fantastical, offbeat whodunit where the living dead team up with the living.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review