An edgy police thriller from the creator of the Barney Thomson series.A psychopath walks the streets of Glasgow, selecting his first victim. He sees his ex-girlfriend everywhere, and he will have her back.When a woman is savagely murdered, her body stabbed over a hundred times, the police know from the nature of the crime that the killer will strike again. DCI Bloonsbury, the once-feted detective, is put in charge of the investigation, but as the killer begins to hit much closer to home and an old police conspiracy starts to unravel, Bloonsbury slides further into morose alcoholic depression. In the middle of it all is Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton, juggling divorce, deception, alcohol, murdered colleagues, and Dylan. He could use a break but the dead will not rest and the past will not be buried until he can catch the latest serial killer to haunt the streets of his city. Also by Douglas Lindsay featuring DS Thomas Hutton, A Plague Of Crows, and coming in October 2014, The Blood That Stains Your Hands"I thoroughly enjoyed Plague Of Crows. It's another superb example of Scottish crime noir. There are a number of elements to highlight. The writing is excellent. Sharp, fast paced, gripping." - Crime Fiction Lover"An excellent, well written story that will appeal to readers of gritty, down to earth crime / noir" - Big Al's Books And Pals"The brilliant and totally entertaining aspect of this novel is the characters, their shenanigans and their humour. Lindsay is funny ... and he writes about real folk like you and me who are just as confused, jealous, broken, greedy and damaged as we are." - I Meant To Read That"Douglas Lindsay is a fine Scottish export that should be hailed in the same way as whisky, Rankin, haggis, tartan and those Jimmy hats that you can pick up from the Royal Mile. Super stuff." - Sea Minor"I was at once cringing at the horror of the murders and then laughing from Hutton's interactions with the finer sex. It takes a talented author to pull off such a seamless switch of gears and Douglas Lindsay is just that." - Just A Guy Who Likes To Read"If you like very dark and disturbing fiction, that is superbly written and beautifully addictive, then this one is definitely for you. Extremely highly recommended." - Old Dogs And New Tricks Douglas Lindsay is the author of 13 novels, including The Unburied Dead (DS Hutton series), We Are The Hanged Man (DCI Jericho), the surreal thriller Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite! and The Long Midnight Of Barney Thomson (the Legend of Barney Thomson series), now a major movie starring Robert Carlyle and Emma Thompson.

The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form of agency, and to undercut the authority claims made by state power. Ranging across time and space from the battlefields of ancient Thebes to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and taking in perspectives from such writers as Sophocles, Machiavelli, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, and Bonnie Honig, Martel asks why the presence of the abandoned corpse can be seen by both authorities and protesters as a source of power, and how those who have been abandoned or marginalized by structures of authority can find in a lifeless body fellow accomplices in their aspirations for dignity and humanity.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial reviews the current state of mortuary archaeology and its practice, highlighting its often contentious place in the modern socio-politics of archaeology. It contains forty-four chapters which focus on the history of the discipline and its current scientific techniques and methods. Written by leading, international scholars in the field, it derives its examples and case studies from a wide range of time periods, such as the middle palaeolithic to the twentieth century, and geographical areas which include Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. Combining up-to-date knowledge of relevant archaeological research with critical assessments of the theme and an evaluation of future research trajectories, it draws attention to the social, symbolic, and theoretical aspects of interpreting mortuary archaeology. The volume is well-illustrated with maps, plans, photographs, and illustrations and is ideally suited for students and researchers.

“[A] superb study of Russian cultural memory makes all too clear, ghosts of the unburied dead affect literature, art, public life and mental health too.” —The Economist After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book’s premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains “the land of the unburied”: the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious. Alexander Etkind shows how post-Soviet Russia has turned the painful process of mastering the past into an important part of its political present. “Every page contains fresh, striking insights, not only in the intrinsic value of art itself, but more significantly in the process of mourning. . . . This brilliant book will be indispensable for scholars of mourning theories.” —Choice “There is undoubtedly much that is new and exciting in this study of the impact of state violence on the form and content of art and scholarship in post-Stalin Russia.” —Russian Review “A fascinating and haunting study of how successive Kremlin leaders and the intelligentsia have explained the Gulag and Stalin’s crimes” —Strategic Europe

When Philadelphia naturalist Samuel George Morton died in 1851, no one cut off his head, boiled away its flesh, and added his grinning skull to a collection of crania. It would have been strange, but perhaps fitting, had Morton’s skull wound up in a collector’s cabinet, for Morton himself had collected hundreds of skulls over the course of a long career. Friends, diplomats, doctors, soldiers, and fellow naturalists sent him skulls they gathered from battlefields and burial grounds across America and around the world. With The Skull Collectors, eminent historian Ann Fabian resurrects that popular and scientific movement, telling the strange—and at times gruesome—story of Morton, his contemporaries, and their search for a scientific foundation for racial difference. From cranial measurements and museum shelves to heads on stakes, bloody battlefields, and the “rascally pleasure” of grave robbing, Fabian paints a lively picture of scientific inquiry in service of an agenda of racial superiority, and of a society coming to grips with both the deadly implications of manifest destiny and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. Even as she vividly recreates the past, Fabian also deftly traces the continuing implications of this history, from lingering traces of scientific racism to debates over the return of the remains of Native Americans that are held by museums to this day. Full of anecdotes, oddities, and insights, The Skull Collectors takes readers on a darkly fascinating trip down a little-visited but surprisingly important byway of American history.

A COMING STORM. A KILLER UNLEASHED. A body is found in a park in the middle of Glasgow. Arms and legs bound by strong, thin wire, small cuts made in the neck and the groin, arteries severed. The murder was surgical, the methods used fastidious and precise. Four days later, another body, another woman, a different park, the murder committed with the same surgical precision. The city, slowly trying to emerge from the throes of a long, cold, deadly winter, is thrown into panic, and officers are called from all outlying stations to the centre. DS Hutton is given speculative leads to follow, people who might have known both victims. And so it is that he comes to interview Dr Crispin Thebes. Retired art dealer, a man who sits at his workshop window by the Clyde, making model ships from scratch. Exact replicas, made with immaculate care.Surgical. Fastidious. Precise... "An underrated writer with an eccentric, blisteringly satirical voice." SUNDAY EXPRESS

The first full study of corpse mistreatment and funeral violation in Greco-Roman epic poetry, illuminating many major texts.

Mourning Remains examines the attempts to find, recover, and identify the bodies of Peruvians who were disappeared during the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in Peru's central southern Andes. Isaias Rojas-Perez explores the lives and political engagement of elderly Quechua mothers as they attempt to mourn and seek recognition for their kin. Of the estimated 16,000 Peruvians disappeared during the conflict, only the bodies of 3,202 victims have been located, and only 1,833 identified. The rest remain unknown or unfound, scattered across the country and often shattered beyond recognition. Rojas-Perez examines how, in the face of the state's failure to account for their missing dead, the mothers rearrange senses of community, belonging, authority, and the human to bring the disappeared back into being through everyday practices of mourning and memorialization. Mourning Remains reveals how collective mourning becomes a political escape from the state's project of governing past death and how the dead can help secure the future of the body politic.

A National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner From the author of Quarantine comes Being Dead, Jim Crace's haunting novel about love, death, and the afterlife. Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes. "Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell--just look at them--that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

The book, On care to be had for the dead, I wrote, having been asked by letter whether it profits any person after death that his body shall be buried at the memorial of any Saint. The book begins thus: Long time unto your Holiness, my venerable fellow bishop Paulinus.