Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zook | 2016 | Kirk Alex | Buy |
Zook is Kirk Alex’s 2016 standalone novel, set in Tucson at a funeral home that is not what it seems. The title character, Ray Zook, is a Desert Storm veteran carrying shrapnel in his body and bad memories in his head. Addicted to booze, pills, and gasoline fumes, he takes a night shift job at the New Pueblo Funeral Home & Chapel, where his duties are supposed to be limited to answering phones and receiving the dead.
Things go wrong quickly. Zook discovers that the funeral home’s owners are involved in grave robbing, coffin swapping, and making bodies disappear. What starts as a simple night job turns into a fight for survival as Zook gets caught in a power struggle between people who have no problem adding one more body to the inventory. The novel blends Alex’s usual noir sensibility with black humor and the kind of grotesque setting that keeps the tension high from start to finish.