Mortician "Zig" Zigarowski, while working on the body of a successful military man, discovers something he was never meant to see, and, to get the answers he needs, sets out to find military artist Nola Brown -- a search that reveals one of the U.S. government's most intensely guarded secrets.

Picking up his late father's arrangement with an anti-religious sect that performs secret burials for marginalized outcasts, an eccentric undertaker in 1970s Beirut confronts perspectives on death in the face of war.

The blogger behind the popular Web series Ask a Mortician describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.

Tom Jokinen began to seriously question the secular funeral rites that are taking over the industry. The question had such a hard grip on his Finnish soul that he decided to become an apprentice undertaker. This book is about what he found, from the mundane to the macabre. For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust--or questioned whether that dust was really the person they loved--Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral...

"Jeanie Masterson has a gift: she can hear the recently dead and give voice to their final wishes and revelations. Inherited from her father, this gift has enabled the family undertakers to flourish in their small Irish town. Yet she has always been uneasy about censoring some of the dead's last messages to the living. Unsure, too, about the choice she made when she left school seventeen years ago: to stay or leave for a new life in London with her...