'I couldn't quite get us back without incident from the burial of my father. We ran into a little trouble along the way. It took us two stolen cards along the Interstate to get us home. It's not exactly easy to go to a funeral halfway across the country when you're up to your ass in debt, when you don't have the money for an airline ticket, and you have a car with shot gaskets. You hear about bereavement fares, but have you actually ever met anyone who flew for free to bury a loved one? It's all part of some benevolent myth. Like everything else in life, there are stories within stories.'

Small town America is Limerick-born Michael Collins's heart of darkness, a territory he maps with infinite precision in this novel of murder and menace.

Almost thirty years ago, when Frank was five, his parents burned to death in a remote Michigan town. Now, Frank's uncle is dead too, shot by a mysterious stranger with a dead man's name, a stranger who now lies in a coma in the local hospital. Frank wants answers to questions about his own past, and he believes that the stranger, who hangs between life and death, might be able to supply them. He leaves New Jersey and heads North, back to the town where he never belonged, to find out why his uncle died, and why people still shrink when they hear his name.

Brilliant and unsettling, this story of the unquiet dead from the prize-winning Irish author charts a dark passage through modern mores.