Woman Of The Dead

The #1 international bestseller praised as “one of the most arresting thrillers I’ve read in years” (#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner), Woman of the Dead is the darkly thrilling tale of Brünhilde Blum, a successful undertaker whose happiness is dashed by a tragedy that sets her on a path of revenge. For the past eight years, Blum has had a good life—a life that masks the terrible secrets of her past. She is a successful undertaker, a doting mother, and the loving wife of a decorated police officer. Then in one devastating moment, a hit-and-run changes everything. As Blum’s grief over the death of her husband, Mark, overwhelms her, only her two little girls can drag her back to the land of the living. Time passes quietly until while packing up Mark’s office, Blum discovers a recorded conversation from a case he was investigating. She soon learns Mark’s death was no accident—it was murder—and Blum dives headfirst into the abyss to find out why and have her revenge. Woman of the Dead, the first book in a trilogy, is an unforgettable thriller about the lengths one passionate woman will go to for vengeance and the tug-of-war between good and evil that exists in all of us. Vivid, tense, and written with breakneck narration, this novel introduces Bernhard Aichner as a rising star in crime fiction.

Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts.

Bubba Snoddy is a good old country boy with a big problem. Although he's personable, handsome, and lives in a historical Southern mansion in a small Texas town, he has just discovered the dead body of a woman to whom he was once engaged to marry. His ex-fiancée was responsible for Bubba being thrown out of the military which in turn caused his shameful return to the tiny town of Pegramville, where everyone is a consummate gossip and no one has any secrets. Sheriff John Headrick, the townsfolk, and his own mother believes Bubba killed his ex-fiancée in a fit of vengeful rage. To top it all off, there are some mighty strange goings-on at the Snoddy Mansion, where ghosts walk the halls rattling chains in the midnight hour, and Bubba's own sainted mother, Miz Demetrice, runs an illegal gambling ring. Rumors run merrily rampant about Bubba, decadent Snoddy ancestors, missing Civil War gold, a to-die-for sheriff's deputy with the greenest eyes Bubba's ever seen, and a Basset Hound named Precious who likes to nip first and ask questions later. Bubba has to find out exactly who did murder his ex-fiancée and quickly before he goes to jail for the crime, or before someone murders him.

Since 1993 over 500 women have been murdered in Ciudad Jurez. Residents believe the true number of disappeared stands at 5,000. When a new disappearance is reported, Kelly Courter, a washed-up Texan boxer, and Rafael Sevilla, a Mexican detective, are sucked into an underworld of organised crime, believing they can outwit the corruption all around. The Dead Women of Jurez follows these two men obsessed with seeking the truth about the female victims of the Mexican border wars.

Smart, sexy, and supernatural—the men and women of the Otherworld live unseen among us. For the most part, mere mortals never suspect their existence—and that’s the way they want it. But now a reckless killer has torn down the wall between our worlds, trapping one very vulnerable, and very mortal, woman in the supernatural cross fire. Robyn Peltier moved to Los Angeles shortly after her young husband’s sudden and unexpected death. Her hope was that her hectic new life as the PR consultant to a spoiled celebutante would provide a distraction from her grief. But when her client is murdered, Robyn finds herself on the run as the prime suspect. And as more bodies pile up around her, it seems only her friend, tabloid journalist Hope Adams, is on her side. But Hope and her somewhat spooky boyfriend Karl know it’s just a matter of time before Robyn is caught. For she’s gotten herself in the middle of a turf war between two Otherworld races who’ll spill any amount of blood—human and inhuman—to protect what they consider theirs for eternity. And the only way Hope can save her friend is by letting her enter a world she’s safer knowing nothing about.

Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women is a cross-genre book, poem/novel, poetry/prose, comedy/tragedy, that submits to no discipline but its own and was conceived by the author in a state of personal, national and planetary grief. In this book, Alma, the true god of our world, is a foul-mouthed middle-aged working-class woman, a junkie who injects heroin into the center of her forehead and dreams and suffers our nightmares with us. With the Dead Women, a community of spirits she attracts before but especially after September 11, 2001, Alma surveys with disbelief and horror the actions of the United States government as it perpetrates one war and prepares for another.

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author’s quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of the narrative. The author struggles through life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family. In this updated edition she adds a coda, “finding mother”, constructed from archives, genealogy, letters, and journals. Initially published in 2010, this second edition includes expanded text and a foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember.

In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs. The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.