Synopsis:
A funeral director searching for a way to start over.
A private investigator who refuses to leave the unknown alone.
And a case that proves the truth doesn’t always set you free—it can bury you.
Someone is hiding the truth.
Funeral invoices don’t match services. Families can’t find their loved ones’ graves. People keep disappearing.
None of it is accidental.
Emily Collins wants nothing to do with it—or the man who brought trouble to her door ten months ago: private investigator Cian “Oz” Ozdemir.
After walking away from her, Oz is back. This time, he’s calling in the favor she owes him.
He needs her funeral service expertise. She wants him gone.
But working side by side forces them to confront the connection they’ve tried to ignore since the day they met.
The deeper they dig, the more chilling the truth becomes. Because someone is using the funeral business to hide far more than accounting errors.
And if Oz and Emily keep searching for answers, the greatest risk they face isn’t losing their lives—it’s losing the life they could build together.
Favorite Lines:
“As long as she was with other people or had something physical to keep her busy, she felt marginally normal.”
“The way you threw yourself at me the other morning, I didn’t feel safe waiting another six months.”
“We’ll have to find a house near a cemetery.”
My Opinion:
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.
Lasting Remains picks up with Emily Collins trying to rebuild her life and career after the fallout from the first book, and honestly, that emotional baggage gives the story a stronger backbone than I expected going in. Emily is working at the newly opened funeral home, A Good Mourning, trying to move forward while still carrying around a mountain of guilt, resentment, and anxiety. The book immediately throws readers back into the strange little world Esmeralda Stone has built, where funeral planning meetings can involve goats pulling wicker caskets, but serious conversations about grief, ethics, and trauma are never too far underneath the humor.
What I liked most about this one was the balance between the mystery plot and the character tension. The suspicious funeral invoice investigation could have easily become dry, but instead it turns into this genuinely interesting unraveling of fraud inside the funeral industry while also forcing Emily back into contact with Oz, who is equal parts infuriating and compelling. Their dynamic carries a huge portion of the book. They bicker constantly, both of them are stubborn to an almost unreasonable degree, and there’s a steady undercurrent of attraction that keeps every interaction tense. The cemetery scene in particular is one of the strongest sequences in the novel because it finally pushes all of Emily’s bottled-up fear and recklessness into the open. It felt suspenseful in a way that didn’t seem overdone.
The humor also worked better for me here than in a lot of mystery-romance hybrids. The funeral industry setting gives the author a lot of room for dark comedy, and Stone leans into it without making the story feel flippant. The conversations between Isaac and Cory were probably my favorite parts outside of the main plot because they bring a warmth and weird domestic energy to the book that offsets Emily’s spiraling internal monologue. There’s also a very Midwestern specificity to the writing that makes the setting feel lived in instead of generic. Little details about local politics, cemeteries, church gossip, family businesses, and small-town scandal all helped the world feel grounded.
Summary:
Overall, I thought Lasting Remains worked well as a blend of mystery, romance, and dark humor. It has a messy emotional core in the best way. The funeral home setting continues to be one of the more unique backdrops I’ve seen in this type of story, and the chemistry between Emily and Oz gives the book a constant tension that kept me reading even during quieter sections. It feels like a story about grief, guilt, attraction, and survival disguised as a quirky mystery novel, and I mean that as a compliment.
Readers who enjoy character-driven mysteries, slow-burn romance, morally complicated protagonists, and small-town drama will probably have a great time with this one. Happy reading!
Check out Lasting Remains here!
