On the gritty streets of L.A., the destinies of four people desperate for connection and redemption are about to collide. An erotic dancer, a grieving husband, a terminally ill ex-con, and a mortician all desperate for redemption collide on Christmas Eve.

Gideon Hawk, the Rogue Lawman, is back in a brand-new western duo . . . In Undertaker's Friend, Hawk shoots three men who try to rob a saloon. One of those men is the spoiled son of a local rancher, Mortimer Stanley. When the smoke finally clears over Cedar Bend, if the Rogue Lawman is still alive, he'll likely discover that one of his only remaining friends is the local undertaker, who whistles while he works and laughs all the way to the bank. In...

"Luke's life has never been 'normal.' How could it be, with his mother holding s�ances and his half-crazy stepfather working as Bridgewater's mortician?"--P. [4] of cover.

After she's bopped on the head from a falling plastic Santa, local undertaker Emma Lee Raines can talk to the not-so-dearly departed. Take Ruthie Sue Payne--innkeeper, gossip queen, and arch-nemesis or Emma Lee's granny--she's adamant that she didn't just fall down those stairs. She was pushed. Now Emma Lee is stuck playing detective or risk being haunted forever.

"Melisende Dulac is a fish out of water after relocating from the East Coast to a small community in the Oregon high desert. But just as she's beginning to think of Barlow County as home, her life takes an ominous turn when she comes upon a grisly multiple car wreck and three shattered bodies on an isolated road outside of town. Near the scene, Melisende trips over a fourth body, that of a newborn girl lying a physics-defying distance from the wreckage....

She brings people into the world (midwife), he ushers them out (undertaker), but for this unconventional pair, love is the greatest journey of all. A slightly jaded, but ever hopeful couple looking to finally get it right. From the minute they meet, the demands of family and their unpredictable professions keep things complicated. But they find that, like birth and death, love is a force that won't be denied.

A former cellist moves back to his hometown with his wife and accepts a position preparing corpses for burial.

"In the phantasmagorical town of Raven's End, nothing is as it seems. A misguided young girl takes refuge in a decrepit old mortuary. There she meets Montgomery Dark, an eccentric undertaker with more than a few skeletons in his closet. Montgomery chronicles the strange history of the town through a series of twisted tales, each more terrifying than the last, but the young girl's world is unhinged when she discovers that the final story is her own."...

"Victorian Scotland is becoming less strange to modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson. Though inhabiting someone else's body will always be unsettling, even if her employers know that she's not actually housemaid Catriona Mitchell, ever since the night both of them were attacked in the same dark alley 150 years apart. Mallory likes her job as assistant to undertaker/medical examiner Dr. Duncan Gray, and is developing true friends--and feelings--in...