Although his father has forbidden it, Ernie, a twelve-year-old business tycoon, makes a tidy profit in the pet funeral business, but when he refuses to give his star employee a raise and the business starts to fall apart, it takes the death of his own dog to bring everyone back together.

Penniless and just a step ahead of the law, a feisty grandmother and her reluctant granddaughter embark upon a spontaneous road trip and discover it isn't about where they go, as long as the journey ends at "Annie's Point."

This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations. "The Optimist's Daughter" is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding...

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 he grew up in, he lost his family too. Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to...

A recently widowed grandmother is determined to grant her husband's last wish, that she set his ashes free over the idyllic bluff they called Annie's Point. When her son Richard refuses to let his mother make the two thousand-mile trip, she takes off anyway with her free-spirited granddaughter in tow.

Ten-year-old Jette wrestles with the death of her younger brother, Emil, at age six, recalling special times they had together, his long-term illness, and his funeral, as well as her parents' grief.

When Aaron's father dies, he must organize the funeral and give the eulogy. Keeping things civil is a problem right from the start when the undertaker makes a horrifying mistake. Then his brother, Ryan wants to be in the spotlight and refuses to pay for anything. But this is nothing compared to information received from a mysterious dwarf at the funeral who exposes way too many family secrets.

Killing a bird with his slingshot as a boy, William Bellman grows up a wealthy family man unaware of how his act of childhood cruelty will have terrible consequences until a wrenching tragedy compels him to enter into a macabre bargain with a stranger in black -- $c Source other than Library of Congress.

A serial killer is strangling young women and dumping their lifeless bodies in the steep forested ravines of southern Indiana. With each corpse he leaves a calling card: a stone figurine wedged deep inside the victim's throat. FBI forensic anthropologist Christine Prusik saw such figurines placed inside the bodies of the dead years ago when researching in Papua New Guinea. Is someone trying to send Christine a message?