Some bodies don't want to be buried. This one doesn't want to be left.

Gus Quarry has embalmed four hundred people in the room her great-grandfather built in 1911. She is very good at it. So when a seventy-one-year-old farmer comes in from a hospital cooler after eleven days ? warm under the sternum, taking four gallons of fluid and giving nothing back ? she knows it isn't a mystery. It's a problem, and problems have causes.

Her sister Iris puts one bare finger on the dead man's hand and finds someone still in there. Awake. Exhausted. Asking her to stay.

The Quarrys have run two businesses out of the same building for a hundred years: the funeral home everyone in Bellmount knows about, and the ledger of names nobody does. Their grandfather wrote down nine cases like this across thirty-one years. He named the problem. He recorded the cure.

He was wrong about both.

Because a ninety-one-year-old woman put her hands on Marlin Ebersole last October to stop the pain for two weeks ? and something happened to her before she could finish. The old Pennsylvania Dutch healing tradition has a word for what she did. It has a rule, too, one so obvious to the woman who taught it that nobody ever wrote it down.

A hold is not broken. It is let go. By the one who made it.

She can't remember her own sister's name.

And the thing she started is still running ? patient, tireless, and looking for somewhere to go.

Real places. Real folklore. One case per book. Book one of Quarry & Sons, a series about two sisters who bury the county's dead and cannot agree on whether the work is saving people or managing an infestation.