After reading Phone Call from Heaven, this book seemed like a natural follow up. As zombie style returns from the dead books are still in vogue now, it was refreshing to read a book about people returning from the dead approached in a more nuanced way. I believe we all think about what we would do or say if we ever got to see those that have died before us come back. Would they be happy for us? Would they be sad? Would we be happy to see them again? Would our memories of them be accurate when the reality of who they were comes look us in the face again? 
 Harold and Lucille Hardgrave lost their son Jacob in an accidental drowning when he was 8. They never had children again and 50 years later they were very old themselves and just waiting for that one day when they could be reunited with their son. Then he comes to them. In fact several people in their home town begin to see their relatives come back from the grave, looking exactly as they had when they died. For the Hardgraves the reality of their son's return was a point of conflict. Religious Lucille wanted to embrace this child and forget the years of mourning the devoted to his memory. Atheist Harold, who became so after his son's death, would rather his son not have come back as he believed this child could not possibly be his real son. 
 Their small town eventually becomes overwhelmed with the amount of dead that have returned. They get a liaison to the government to come and oversee easy transition of those who died to their rightful relatives. Agent Bellamy befriends the Hardgraves, but soon finds himself in a bad spot as the government decides that the best way to deal with the "Returned" as they are called by isolating them in camps. Bellamy gets to run the camp in their town and the camp quickly becomes a metaphor for Nazi concentration camps. With the overwhelming number of "Returneds", people begin to treat them with fear as we all so often do of "others". 
 The world explodes as religion and reality clash and some people believe that the dead should stay dead and that those that have returned are an affront to God. So they do what all good religious people do when their believes are shattered, they begin to kill of those that would challenge their beliefs with their existence. 
 The themes of life and death that this book explores are undoubtedly fascinating and this book approached the dead coming back in a much more elegant way than "Phone Call from Heaven." However as the book approached its ending I realized that Jason Mott had only grazed the surface of his life and death philosophies and I hadn't really connected to the characters. It had a strange ending to what could have been a phenomenal book.