The Vicarious Liver — Beth Amos

Mattie Winston, RN, is wryly cynical, politically incorrect, and inherently nosy, traits that suit her well when she trades in her hospital scrubs and operating room table for a plastic apron and autopsy table. As a Deputy Coroner, Mattie gets to poke her nose into everyone else's business and in the small Wisconsin town where she lives gossip is a highly tradable commodity. But Mattie's first case â€" a murder â€" hits a little too close to home. The victim is Karen Owenby, Mattie's former coworker and the woman who had an affair with Mattie's soon-to-be-ex-husband, David.

As Mattie tries to determine if her husband is a killer, her judgment is clouded by her attraction to the darkly handsome homicide detective in charge of the case, though her romantic notions are dampened by the fact that her own name is at the top of the list of suspects. Unable to pursue the case officially, Mattie launches her own investigation aided by a cast of quirky characters that includes a computer hacker with a superhero complex, a conspiracy theorist, a bug-loving nephew, a hypochondriac mother, and a new hairdresser whose office is in the basement of a funeral home. With their help, Mattie follows a trail of sordid secrets, deadly betrayals, and missing underwear as she races against the clock to identify a killer before she ends up as the next victim on the medical examiner's autopsy table.