Being dead

This book is billed as an interesting yarn about two corpses. It begins when a middle-aged academic couple is pointlessly murdered in a remote spot on the British coast. When I picked this up, I thought it would have a lot of scientific material about what happens to corpses; sort of a forensic fairy tale. There's quite a bit of that here, but not quite as much as I was expecting. The book rather quickly abandons its hook and investigates the lives of the couple through flashback. This takes it in a different direction than I was expecting, and robs a bit of the novelty from the book.

The flashbacks tell the story of a boomer couple over a few decades. It's one of those "whatever happened to our dreams" stories that gets a bit stultifying in the middle, but is partially redeemed by the scientific bent of the couple and by the gradual revelation of the murder spot's significance in their lives.

A subplot involving the couple's self-centered daughter and her GenX angst is unsatisfying. I kept wondering how the cops would go about their forensic work once the bodies were found, but not enough time is spent on that. Still, this book IS different, and I enjoyed most of it. It just showed me a few too many scenes I didn't care for, and didn't show me some of the ones I wanted to see.