Okay, so I’m suffering through a major bronchial infection, doped up on five different meds including a narcotic cough suppressant. My world is a pretty hazy place right now. Could this be the reason that I found Caskets and Corruption inoffensive, and maybe even somewhat appealing? What a strange book.

Lizzie Cantrell is tired of dealing with death and all its accompanying angst and drama. Her sister, Annie, loves being a mortuary cosmetician, but Lizzie is ready to wait tables to pay the bills so she can stop painting portraits of the recently deceased. When Annie’s funeral director, “Old Stiff-Neck” fires her, Lizzie feels it is in some part due to her recent visit to the funeral home, and resolves to have a word with “Old Stiff-Neck” on Annie’s behalf.

While Lizzie is meeting with Phillip Van Dyke (Old Stiff Neck), he receives an odd shipment of military remains. A soldier, previously listed as missing in action, is shipped to Phillip’s funeral home with no escort, little paperwork, and without the parents of the deceased being informed. When a twitchy airman shows up demanding the remains be given into his custody, Phillip becomes suspicious and opens the casket. What Phillip finds is a body, presumably an anonymous Afghani, and many bags of heroine. With Lizzie as his only assistant, Phillip resolves to keep the body and the drugs out of the airman’s possession, setting in motion events that have Lizzie joining him on a wacky adventure.

Lizzie steals a hearse right while it’s being loaded for someone else’s funeral procession, loads the military remains into it, and takes off at high speed, stopping briefly to pick up Phillip. The mourners have no idea of the switch so the procession follows, as does the enraged airman, making a car chase worthy of any screwball comedy. Phillip and Lizzie meet Annie and another funeral home employee in a later, quieter moment, in order to get cash and changes of clothes. The exchange is interrupted by bad guys, so our heroes end up with Annie’s pampered Chinese Crested dog, no money, and the bags of clothing. Lizzie and Phillip have to ditch cars several times, stealing a different car and moving the body to the trunk of the new one each time. In order to keep moving they have to take odd jobs to earn money, with Lizzie being forced to wear the evening dress that Annie packed for some reason. There are a lot of amusing moments like these throughout the book, and I appreciated the author’s zany sense of humor.

There were unfortunately a number of things I didn’t like about the book. Number one on the list of things that made me crazy was – why didn’t Phillip just call the MPs and tell them to come get the body and the drugs? They could have even gone to the civilian police. Instead Phillip planned to take Lizzie with him to a convention of funeral directors in another city, to get help there. Why? Why? Why? Maybe I was too high to get it. Another item on the negative list is Phillip’s choice of attire. He wears turtlenecks all the time, due to scarring. Understandable – unless it’s hot and he wears a short sleeve knit turtleneck. Visions of dickies running through my head didn’t make Phillip a very attractive hero. The normal freshman errors were present – choppy writing, too much angst, times when the humor fell flat or was completely over the top, and scenarios so unbelievable as to make them impossible to disregard.

While the humor shows some promise, I find I can’t recommend the book on that alone.