Showing results for "the quest" in Death & Grief

What happens if you die without family or money? The answer to this very three-in-the-morning question is that Evie, or someone like her, will step in and arrange your funeral. Evie is a local council worker charged with carrying out Section 46 funerals under the Public Health Act. Or to put it in less cold, legislative language; funerals for those with nobody around, willing or able to bury or cremate them. Ashes to Admin lifts the coffin lid on some moving and unexpected personal life stories. 

Harry Richards, a local solicitor, is found in his car, throat slit. DI Clare Mackay is on the case. She soon learns that Harry was not the upstanding man he seemed to be. Finding the killer should be easy. Then the wife of one of Harry's colleagues is discovered dead in her car, and Clare realises there is something more sinister at play… Can she find out who's behind the murders before they turn their attention to her?

DI Geraldine Steel knows people go missing all the time; sometimes because they don't want to be found. So when her partner Ian asks her to look into the disappearance of his football-buddy's girlfriend, her first instinct is to reassure him there's no need for concern. Until she's called to a suspected murder, and all her instincts tell her she's right about the identity of the victim. The young woman has earth and leaf mould and fragments of twigs in her long fair hair, her nose, her mouth, under her finger nails, clinging to her clothes. It's as if she'd been completely encased in earth. 

For Julia Engelhorn life divides into the Before and After. There was a time Before, when her life was filled with the joys and struggles of parenthood, when she was run off her feet trying to take care of a seven year old and three year old twins Octavia and Maximo. And then there was a time After, when her world was encased in darkness, when there was only one child left and she had become a member of a club that no one wants to join.

We plan, as the old proverb says, and God laughs. But most of us don't find it all that funny when things go wrong. Most of us want love, a nice home, good work and happy children. Many of us grew up with parents who made these things look relatively easy and assumed we would get them, too. So what do you do if you don't? What do you do when you feel you've messed it all up and your friends seem to be doing just fine? For Christina Patterson, it was her job as a journalist that kept her going through the ups and downs of life. And then she lost that, too. 

University student Matt Pine has just received devastating news. Nearly his entire family have been found dead while holidaying in Mexico. The local police claim it was an accident, but the FBI aren't convinced - and they won't tell Matt why. The tragedy thrusts his family into the media spotlight again. Seven years ago, Matt's older brother, Danny, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his teenage girlfriend. Danny has always sworn he was innocent, and last year, a true-crime documentary that claimed he was wrongfully convicted went viral.