The Mortician's Ledger
A 1970s Philadelphia Mystery

About this book:

In the basement of Morgan & Sons Funeral Home, Walter Morgan has spent thirty years stitching the city's dead back into something presentable for their families. But when two young Black men arrive on the same night—both logged as overdoses, both bearing identical puncture wounds at the neck and telltale restraint marks on their wrists—Walter recognizes a pattern the police are desperate to ignore. The ledger in his desk drawer holds forty years of names, but the new entries he's writing in a hidden notebook tell a different story: something is hunting the sons of North Philadelphia, and the badge on the door is helping it happen.

With his nephew Marcus pushing for the precinct and a reporter's notebook circling closer, Walter walks a razor's edge between the law and the truth. He has the chemicals, the anatomy, and the silence of the prep room to conduct his own examination—but every tissue sample he smuggles out, every name he connects, puts the funeral home and the people he loves in the crosshairs of a conspiracy that reaches from the alleys of Kensington to the corridors of City Hall.

Atmospheric, razor-sharp, and steeped in 1974 Philadelphia grit, *The Mortician's Ledger* introduces an unforgettable sleuth: a widowed undertaker who knows that the dead have no voice unless the living dare to listen. For fans of Attica Locke and James Ellroy, this is historical crime fiction at its most visceral—where the embalming fluid masks more than decay, and justice is a body you have to steal back from the system.