“A delightful browse for anybody tantalized by the prospect of disappearing without a trace.” -Erik Larson, NY Times bestselling writer of Dead Wake

“Delivers all of the lo-fi spy shenanigans and caught-red-handed schadenfreude you’re longing for.” -NPR

“A lively romp.” -The Boston Globe

“Grim fun.” -The New York Times

“Outstanding topic, absorbing book.” -The Seattle Instances

“The most literally escapist summer read you could hope for.” -The Paris Review

Is it still possible to fake about Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud your very own death in the twenty-first hundred years? With six figures of student loan debt, Elizabeth Greenwood was tempted to learn. So off she sets on the darkly comic foray into the world of death fraud, where for $30,000 a consultant could make you disappear-but your dubious insurance company might hire a private detective to find out your coffin…only to find it filled up with rocks.

Greenwood tracks down a British guy who all staged a kayaking accident and then returned to live in his own house even though all his neighbors thought he was deceased. She takes a call from Michael Jackson (no, he’s not really dead-or so her new acquaintances would have her believe), stalks message boards for folks contemplating pseudocide, and gathers intel on dark marketplace morgues in the Philippines, where she may or might not get some deceptive goodies of her personal. Along the way, she discovers that love can be a significantly less common motive than money, which making your death look like a drowning practically guarantees that you’ll end up being caught. (Disappearing while walking, however, is a way great to visit.)

Playing Dead can be a charmingly bizarre investigation in the vein of Jon Ronson and Mary Roach into our all-too-human desire to escape from your lives we lead, and the men and women desperate enough to stop their lives-and their families-to begin again.