The Undertaker's Daughter

Kate Mayfield grew up in a funeral home in southern Kentucky during the turbulent 1960's. The Undertaker's Daughter, offers a child's account of the business of death.

Her father, the charismatic Beau Brummel of morticians, splashed onto Jubilee's segregated community as one of its two white undertakers. A philanderer, and a closeted alcoholic in a small, god-fearing community, he opened the door of their funeral home to family feuds, fetishes, and victims of accidents, murder and suicide. The living and the dead entered their house like a vapour, in ways that only the South can conjure. They were a community peppered with flawed misfits that learned that there are no secrets in a small town, except the ones with which we are buried.

Kate's research into her father's life and his time serving in Europe during World War II was extensive and there are few readers who will fail to be moved by her discovery as to why her father chose to become an undertaker.