The Funeral Fixer

A bride can still change her mind. A corpse has already committed to the bit.

Gail Domingo has built her career fixing disasters for Manila's ultra-wealthy. Runaway grooms, feuding relatives, spectacular wedding meltdowns, she can handle all of them.

But a dead sugar baron, six quarrelling heirs, and an eight-hundred-pound bronze casket with a Friday-noon deadline? That is an entirely different kind of problem.

When ninety-two-year-old Don Severino Montinola dies, his final journey becomes an escalating logistical nightmare. His family is at war; the permits are disappearing, a fortune in paintings hangs in the balance, and a municipal health officer is getting dangerously close to discovering what is really inside the cargo.

Gail's solution? Reclassify a dead tycoon as eighty kilos of botanical fertilizer and keep moving.

Unfortunately, the complications are only beginning:

• A priest with thirty-five years of unfinished business.

• A sister broadcasting the family feud live to the world.

• A flooded crypt concealing more than one secret.

• A long-lost daughter who has no intention of being found.

• And a vintage sugar-mill locomotive about to become part of the most unusual funeral procession in Visayan history.

When an unread codicil threatens to expose a thirty-two-year-old hit-and-run, the inheritance suddenly becomes the least of the family's problems. With a relentless NBI investigator closing in and the cathedral clock counting down, Gail must get one very stubborn corpse to its final resting place before the Montinolas tear each other apart.

In a family where everyone has something to hide, getting the dead to their destination may be the easiest part.

The Funeral Fixer is the second Gail Domingo caper mystery: a fast-moving, witty caper packed with eccentric characters, family feuds, tropical absurdity, and the logistical disasters that no amount of paperwork can quite fix.