LENORE'S LAST FUNERAL

Lenore is a professional mourner with the unwanted gift of a peculiar variety of precognition. She spends her days pretending to grieve for strangers and her nights genuinely grieving her recently deceased boyfriend. When Lenore is hired to attend the funeral of wealthy businessman Elliott Brindle, she discovers that she not only is the sole attendee but that, as a result of a curious stipulation in the will, she is now the heir to his estate.

Upon inspecting his open casket, she finds a small gold watch in his mouth, engraved with the name of his missing daughter, Riley. She discovers that her newly inherited house is filled with all manner of strange secrets, not least of which is the cryonically frozen corpse in the backyard shed. Her arrival at the house instigates an encounter with Brindle’s former colleague, Csaba, who controls a cult of cryonics-obsessed aristocrats who want to find Brindle’s long-lost daughter for a variety of bizarre and sinister reasons.

Meanwhile, Lenore’s brother Darius is working on the set of a mysterious film that seems to never finish production, and whose lead star has been invited to be the cult’s spokesperson. Lenore and Darius soon cross paths with an alarmingly pallid young man named Orin, who is also trying to come to terms with a recent death; his own. As the threads of their stories bind together and the search for Riley continues, Lenore discovers that there is far more to the cult—and to Riley—than any of them could have guessed.

. . .

“This captivating thriller will have you questioning everything you know about funerals. Like what exactly is a moirologist? Donellan blurs the line between literary and genre fiction in his portrayal of the human condition…A nice mix of the macabre and quirkiness, Lenore’s Last Funeral is an intriguing look at mankind’s mortality and the struggle to make sense of death.” 

~ Ivanka Fear, author of Where is My Husband?