TETHERED

After being gang-raped in high school, having a stillborn baby, and being shamed by her grandmother, the adult Clara Marsh becomes an undertaker who relates only to the dead. She's haunted by the memory of an unidentified murdered child, "Precious Doe," whose body she prepared for burial three years earlier. Another child looks to Clara for affection and is later seen in a kiddie-porn film. Narrator Rebecca Lowman adds to the gloom, reading in a soft, lackluster voice with ominous portents. Lowman's reading is flat, but MacKinnon doesn't give her much to work with. Clara is terminally depressed, and not even handsome detective Mike Sullivan can cheer her. Unrelentingly grim, without the dark humor of, say, "Six Feet Under," undertaker Clara's melodramatic miseries overwhelm the mystery. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2008]