The Undertaker's Holiday

A broken-down coach, a crooked country inn, and a dead man upstairs clutching a card that reads ONE OF US IS ALREADY DEAD — when a motor coach crash strands the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion at The Merry Mourner, a lonely inn at the edge of Brackmere Hollow, they find themselves trapped by a storm with eight strangers and one corpse; the dead man is a blackmailer who summoned this collection of passengers for reasons none will admit, and among them are a widow who has buried three husbands and considers murder an inconvenience, an undertaker on holiday who smiles at death with professional interest, a pale young woman who was declared dead years ago and never told, and a second card slipped under a door reading THE FIRST DEATH WAS ONLY THE CORRECTION OF AN ERROR; as the detective untangles a decades-old fraud, a false burial, stolen inheritance, and the cold logic of a man who believed murder was merely an administrative correction, The Undertaker's Holiday is an original Golden Age–style mystery about stranded strangers, buried secrets, and the discovery that the most dangerous man at the table is the one who handles death for a living.