Matt McAvoy Book Review

Yvgeny Yedynak is an undertaker with panache.  He employs a gravedigger the police mistake for a zombie, carries the finger of his dead father in his pocket and drives a hearse called Cerberus, in Greek mythology the dog who guards the gates of Hades.  He is selectively honest and sees no harm in pawning anything of value remaining on a corpse once the relatives have surrendered it for burial. However, when he discovers the headless and handless body of an elderly man in one of his freshly-dug graves, an inscription upon an old German watch found on it and a warning from the pawnbroker identify the body as Jewish.  It bothers Yvgeny that someone could survive the Holocaust only to be murdered in the middle of Georgia, seventy years later.  So, as one of Sherlock Holmes’s greatest fans, he commences a little detective work of his own.

The Body in the Hole is interesting, entertaining, and well-written.  As the mystery grows, Zeitlin draws the reader in, painting a lively picture of a small town, its inhabitants and way of life, and driving the novel to its conclusion with a full tank of graveyard humour.  Yvgeny himself is a memorable creation.  He takes a pragmatic attitude to life, death and detecting, but unfortunately his style doesn’t suit everyone, nor is his original approach to embalming and romance appreciated.  Perhaps he is misunderstood, or misundertaken.
 
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