Description
There’s a body missing at the morgue.
Alexander Steeple should know - he sleeps directly above the corpses.
Growing up at Steeple and Sons Mortuary and Crematorium, with a mortician mum who cuts up cadavers, Alexander is pretty used to death. The thing is, the dead usually stay where they belong.
Not today.
Alexander wasn’t planning to launch a full-blown investigation, but when his mother knows more than she is letting on and when a trail of clues begins to show itself, he cannot help but chase the mystery.
Will he uncover what happened, or will the truth stay buried?
Review
Alex gets called all sorts of names at school, just because he lives with his Mum above the funeral home. His colourful taxidermy-loving cousin, Lexi, is his Mum’s apprentice. Essentially, they cut up cadavers and prepare them for burial. It’s not really Alex’s thing - he is more of a writer and dreamer. But when he hears noises in the night and he believes that his Mum may be involved in body swapping he decides to investigate...
Together with Lexi and his best friend, Jade, they decide to go to the reading of the will of the dead man. It turns out that he was a rich man who lived in a creepy old mansion and wrote a controversial will - almost leaving out his greedy, lazy children unless they could uncover a puzzle that he set.
Alex is determined to uncover what role his Mum played in this, and might even unlock some family secrets along the way...
This is a terrific and macabre story, full of mystery and detective work, and about proving that your loved one is innocent even if it takes going to great lengths to do so. With the setting, it will best suit middle secondary readers, but can be read by those in lower secondary as well.
