Have you ever hit a passage in a book that made you stop. And go back and read it. This has got to be one of "the" passages I've read lately (sure it's a pretty confrontational event, but the description is shatteringly good). Context is that somebody has just put a gun in their mouth and pulled the trigger:
"Then it begins again. His hand, still gripping the gun, falls away. It hits the top of his thigh, slides into the arm of the chair; the gun clicks against it and falls onto the carpet. His head drops down, his chin hits his chest; the gunshot hole in his skull is like an eye staring at me, the blood falling through it giving the impression it's winking at me. Blood-matted hair falls into place and blocks the view. Blood pools on his shirt. It starts to pull away from the ceiling, droplets that form stalactites before breaking away and raining down. They pad softly into the carpet, make small thudding noises on the fronts of his legs, the back of his neck, the top of his head. It drops onto my shoulders, onto my arms, onto my hands that are still on the desk for him to see. He stays slumped there, this dead weight in my office chair, then he slowly tips forward, he gains momentum, then his forehead cracks heavily into the edge of the desk, jarring his head upright as his body falls, keeping him balanced for a moment longer, the back of his head almost touching my shoulders, his face exposed and his empty eyes staring at me, before he continues down to the ground where he lies in a clump that five seconds ago was a person but is a person no more."
Okay so maybe I'm weird.
A standard exhumation becomes anything but for private investigator Theodore Tate, when bodies begin bubbling to the surface of the cemetery lake. Tate knows he has to let it go and let his former colleagues in the police deal with it. But when the coffin is opened and its occupant is not the old man supposed to be inside, he knows he cannot walk away. He can't let the police keep digging either, because they are getting dangerously close to digging up the real truth: the truth about him. With the evidence mounting against him, Tate must stay ahead of the police and out of jail in order to find a killer. A killer who could turn Tate into the very man he despises.