While driving to the funeral of a friend, a couple married twenty-eight years examine the expectations and disappointments of their marriage.

Annie passes away at the youthful age of 56, leaving her high-school friend, Katherine, responsible for organizing her traveling funeral. Katherine receives a UPS package with Annie's favorite pair of red high-top sneakers, which contain her ashes, and instructions to contact four other women who played pivotal roles in her life. All of the women either have met or heard of each other through Annie, and all agree to fulfill her request that they fly...

Laurel Hand, long absent from the South, comes from Chicago to New Orleans, where her father dies after surgery. With Fay, the stupid new young wife of her father, Laurel returns to her former Mississippi home and stays a few days after the funeral for reunions with old friends. In a night alone in the house she grew up in, she confronts elements of the past and comes to a better understanding of it and of herself and her parents.

"Five summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right. A magazine writer has to make a choice when she returns to the lake she grew up on, and to the man she thought she'd never have to live without, in this achingly nostalgic debut. They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser that has felt too true for the last decade, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life. Instead of glittering summers...

/Accelerated Reader/A mysterious voice weaves the story of an African-American door-to-door salesman of beauty products who shoots his young lover, and his wife who tries to disfigure the corpse with a knife in the winter of 1926.

From Ann Cleeves--bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows--comes the first in a gripping new series. "Ann Cleeves is one of my favorite mystery writers."--Louise Penny In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father's funeral takes place. Once loved and cherished, the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community...

Caught up in a moment of boyhood competition, William Bellman recklessly aims his slingshot at a rook resting on a branch, killing the bird instantly. It is a small but cruel act and is soon forgotten. By the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, William seems to have put the whole incident behind him. It was as if he never killed the thing at all. But rooks dont forget. Years later, when a stranger mysteriously enters Williams life,...

"One summer's day we started a business called Funerals Ltd, to help all the poor dead animals in the world. Esther did the digging, I wrote the poems, and Esther's little brother, Puttie, cried."--Page [4] of cover.

The untimely death of her single mother, Margaret Batten, brings Sunny back to small-town King George, New Hampshire, the scene of her unhappy adolescence, where she discovers old family secrets and a possible half-brother she never knew she had.

Seven-year-old Suzie is curious and fearful about what Grandma's funeral will be like.