Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn't matter to others? In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans follow four individuals in Los Angeles,...

Seven years after her son Jim, a freelance journalist, was captured and killed by ISIS - a brutal act that produced one of the 21st century's most haunting images - Diane Foley is offered the opportunity to meet her son's murderer over three days in a Virginia courthouse. So begins American Mother-- which reads alternately like a thriller, a biography, a mystery, a memoir, and a literary examination of grace. In this astonishing book, we are all invited...

When his son Will dies following in his footsteps, former CIA agent Mac Dekker, forced into hiding after being framed for treason, returns to the field to uncover the secrets Will was hiding and finds himself working to stop a terrorist plot that threatens thousands.

Returning home to Pennywhistle, Tennessee, for her beloved daddy's funeral, PJ Spoon, abandoning her PhD program at Vanderbilt, impulsively takes a job as a fry cook at the Chickie Shak, where she meets and falls for Boof, a talented singer-songwriter searching for her birth mother.