Mike Shayne finds strange secrets hidden beneath the cover of a grisly double suicide It’s 10:30 pm, and Mike Shayne is sipping cognac, ruminating on the perfection of Lucy Hamilton’s fried chicken, when a shotgun fires upstairs. Following the acrid stench of gunpowder to a locked door halfway down the hall, Shayne has no choice but to batter it down, tumbling face first into the scene of a particularly ugly double suicide. The woman lies on the floor in the middle of the sitting room, her face twisted by the deadly kiss of cyanide. A few feet beyond her body is what remains of a man, his head obliterated by the shotgun’s blast. The woman’s father is one of Miami’s power brokers, and he refuses to believe that his daughter would end her life over a silly affair. Isn’t it possible, he asks, that she was murdered? Convinced or not, Shayne is the only man ruthless enough to find out. The Corpse That Never Was is the 45th book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

“One of our greatest thinkers” on death presents a radical new approach to thinking about dying and the human corpse (Caitlin Doughty, mortician and bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes). A fascinating exploration of the relationship between technology and the human corpse throughout history—from 19th-century embalming machines to 21st-century death-prevention technologies. Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

Speaking the truth with impartial scientific knowledge, and advocating justice for the silent. Words and actions can mean a thousand things in any mortality case, but only the body can provide the truth to decipher the cause of death. Dr. Rohayu, a Forensic Pathologist knows she has a duty to the dead and lives by the statement, "a dead body never lies." She has taken the unsaid oath to be the voice and safeguard the ones who are not able to tell their story. With Malaysia's diverse melting pot of race, culture, and religion, Dr. Rohayu has been through a plethora of extraordinary scenarios. It is no ordinary walk in the park when social stigmas, and taboos come into play, but rest assured Dr. Rohayu is committed to seek justice and provide closure. A food enthusiast with an infectious bubbly demeanor, Dr. Rohayu never fails to bring a little flare into her field of work. With the help of her co-author Fatin, they have transformed her work to be a compelling piece of art for the world to see and understand. No doubt in Dr. Rohayu and Fatin's mind, every single person deserves to be heard, the right to love, and freedom to be their true self. With a combination of science and empathy, they have created a unique piece of writing. Step into Dr. Rohayu's shoes as she brings you through these ten cases, she believes can be an educational one, and serves as a beacon of hope to the people who feel their voices are not worthy enough to be heard.

“Deliciously macabre and utterly decadent.” —Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper In this dark and twisty feminist historical mystery, a teenage girl starts a new life as a grave robber but quickly becomes entangled in a murderer's plans. Soon after her best friend Kitty mysteriously dies, orphaned seventeen-year-old Molly Green is sent away to live with her "aunt." With no relations that she knows of, Molly assumes she has been sold as a maid for the price of an extra donation in the church orphanage's coffers. Such a thing is not unheard of. There are only so many options for an unmarried girl in 1850s Philadelphia. Only, when Molly arrives, she discovers her aunt is very much real, exceedingly wealthy, and with secrets of her own. Secrets and wealth she intends to share—for a price. Molly's estranged aunt Ava, has built her empire by robbing graves and selling the corpses to medical students who need bodies to practice surgical procedures. And she wants Molly to help her procure the corpses. As Molly learns her aunt's trade in the dead of night and explores the mansion by day, she is both horrified and deeply intrigued by the anatomy lessons held at the old church on her aunt's property. Enigmatic Doctor LaValle's lessons are a heady mixture of knowledge and power and Molly has never wanted anything more than to join his male-only group of students. But the cost of inclusion is steep and with a murderer loose in the city, the pursuit of power and opportunity becomes a deadly dance.

Throughout the centuries, different cultures have established a variety of procedures for handling and disposing of corpses. Often the methods are directly associated with the deceased's position in life, such as a pharaoh's mummification in Egypt or the cremation of a Buddhist. Treatment by the living of the dead over time and across cultures is the focus of this study. Burial arrangements and preparations are detailed, including embalming, the funeral service, storage and transport of the body, and forms of burial. Autopsies and the investigative process of causes of deliberate death are fully covered. Preservation techniques such as cryonic suspension and mummification are discussed, as well as a look at the "recycling" of the corpse through organ donation, donation to medicine, animal scavengers, cannibalism, and, of course, natural decay and decomposition. Mistreatments of a corpse are also covered.

A “marvelously macabre” (Kirkus Reviews) history of the bizarre afterlives of corpses of the celebrated and notorious dead. For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination. Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse. Einstein’s brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy—which they drank. From Alexander the Great to Elvis Presley, and from Beethoven to Dorothy Parker, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses, and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death.

Born into a family of corpse washers, Jawad abandons tradition by enrolling in Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts to study sculpting, but the conditions caused by Saddam Hussein's oppressive rule force a return home to the family business.