Main description:

Three sips to mind the dead . . .

Rebekkah Barrow never forgot the attention her grandmother Maylene bestowed upon the dead of Claysville, the small town where Bek spent her adolescence. There wasn't a funeral that Maylene didn't attend, and at each one Rebekkah watched as Maylene performed the same unusual ritual: She took three sips from a silver flask and spoke the words "Sleep well, and stay where I put you."

Now Maylene is dead, and Bek must go back to the place she left a decade earlier. She soon discovers that Claysville is not just the sleepy town she remembers, and that Maylene had good reason for her odd traditions. It turns out that in Claysville the worlds of the living and the dead are dangerously connected; beneath the town lies a shadowy, lawless land ruled by the enigmatic Charles, aka Mr. D. If the dead are not properly cared for, they will come back to satiate themselves with food, drink, and stories from the land of the living. Only the Graveminder, by tradition a Barrow woman, and her Undertaker—in this case Byron Montgomery, with whom Bek shares a complicated past—can set things right once the dead begin to walk.

Although she is still grieving for Maylene, Rebekkah will soon find that she has more than a funeral to attend to in Claysville, and that what awaits her may be far worse: dark secrets, a centuries-old bargain, a romance that still haunts her, and a frightening new responsibility—to stop a monster and put the dead to rest where they belong.

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“A deliciously creepy tale that is as skillfully wrought as it is spellbindingly imagined.”

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“Compelling, sexy, and riveting, you will not want to miss Graveminder!”

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“Dark and dreamy . . . Rod Serling would have loved GRAVEMINDER . . . Marr is not tapping into the latest horde of zombie novels, she’s created a new kind of undead creature . . . A creatively creepy gothic tale for grown-ups.”

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“If anyone can put the goth in Southern Gothic, it’s Melissa Marr...Marr [is] careful to ensure that the book’s wider themes ... matter to us as much as the multiple cases of heebie-jeebies she doles out.”

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“Marr creates sympathetic characters, she takes readers to places both sinister and delightful, and there’s a satisfying end to a wonderfully awful villain...Fans will be looking for a sequel to this cozy horror story as soon as they read the last page.”

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“Marr serves up a quirky dark fantasy fashioned around themes of fate, free will-and zombies…well-drawn characters and their dramatic interactions keep the tale loose and lively.”

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“Melissa Marr has created a fabulous, richly-imagined world in Claysville and its attendant piece of the Underworld.”

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“No one builds worlds like Melissa Marr.”

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“Plan ahead to read this one, because you won’t be able to put it down! Haunting, captivating, brilliant! ”

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“The emotional dance between Rebekkah and Byron will captivate female readers [and] fantasy-horror fans will demand more.”

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“The über-talented Marr takes her mesmerizing storytelling talents into the adult arena. In her atmospheric and eerie tale, readers and protagonists jointly discover the secrets literally buried in this small town as Marr weaves a richly gothic tale filled with curses, responsibility and death. Outstanding!”

Short description/annotation:

“No one builds worlds like Melissa Marr.”
—Charlaine Harris
 
“Welcome to the return of the great American gothic.”
—Del Howison, Bram Stoker Award-winning editor of Dark Delicacies
 
“A deliciously creepy tale that is as skillfully wrought as it is spellbindingly imagined.”
—Kelley Armstrong

Anyone who adores dark fantasy, horror, and paranormal suspense is going to love Graveminder, a hauntingly atmospheric tale of the walking dead—and the living who are charged with keeping them at rest—from Melissa Marr, the New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series. A young woman returns to the rural small town of her adolescence only to discover it is cursed ground bordering the land of the dead in this spectacularly imagined supernatural tale that will appeal to fans of Charlaine Harris, Joe Hill, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Neil Gaiman, and Carol Goodman.