Speak for the Dead
When brilliant young forensic medicine intern Ethan Cross, the grandson of the last undertaker in a family that buried generations of the county's dead, is exiled to the forgotten backwater....
When brilliant young forensic medicine intern Ethan Cross, the grandson of the last undertaker in a family that buried generations of the county's dead, is exiled to the forgotten backwater of Blackwood County, he expects a career-ending punishment. Instead, forty-eight blood-drained corpses under a cold storage plant hand him the case of the century. He is thrust into a series of impossible murders that defy every rule of modern forensic science. Partnered with hot-headed detective Mark Kowalski and the fiercely independent rookie investigator Chloe Albright, Ethan draws on the forgotten mortuary lore secretly passed down by his vanished grandfather—knowledge that allows him to read the dead in ways no laboratory ever could. As each case uncovers darker secrets buried beneath the county's quiet surface, Ethan must solve crimes that no one else can explain while hiding the unsettling truth that his greatest gift is also the reason everyone begins to fear what, exactly, he is.