Colder Than Death

Grave robbers looking for jewels while breaking into 19th century mausoleums in a 200-year-old cemetery stumble onto the remains of a body that shouldn’t be there: a teenaged girl. They take off, leaving the door to the mausoleum open.

The cemetery night watchman finds the body and calls the police who in turn call Del Coltrane, the 33-year-old funeral director of Henderson’s Funeral Home.

Although Del isn’t used to murder, he’s used to death, so initially this is just another corpse. But after the victim is identified as a local teen long thought to be a runaway, Del is pulled into the case as a favor to the tough-as-nails 15-year-old niece of the dead girl.

Del quickly realizes that the niece is the only member of the victim’s family who seems to care that her body has been found and that she was murdered. Even the local police don’t give the case top priority because years ago the victim had a reputation as a druggie who hung with a bad crowd.

Del also relates to the niece’s sense of grief because he too lost someone when he was about the same age: his high school girlfriend, also thought to be a runaway.

As this unlikely pair tries to piece things together, they arrive at the horrifying conclusion that the same person may have been responsible for a series of disappearances spanning 20 years in what everyone thought was a tranquil place to live.