In her debut mystery, A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer, Maxie Dara introduced readers to S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, Transport, and Handling of Essences), an organization of grim reapers who tidy up souls after death. The series' second installment, A Grim Reaper's Guide to Cheating Death, focuses on Nora Bird, a S.C.Y.T.H.E case administrator who assigns daily death files to grim reapers for soul collection. Nora has been terrified of death since losing her parents as a child, which counterintuitively makes S.C.Y.T.H.E. the perfect job for her: she can learn the many ways death occurs and structure her life to avoid them.
Nora's routine is insular and risk averse until the morning she opens a case file and sees that her twin brother, Charlie, is scheduled for death that day. With uncharacteristic disregard for her employer's rules, Nora steals the file and rushes to collect Charlie (and his chatty parrot, Jessica), determined to keep him alive at any cost by getting him somewhere S.C.Y.T.H.E can't reach. Their efforts to avoid the file's now constantly changing cause of death take them to the remote town where their father grew up, which holds odd people and family secrets--and someone who is trying to kill Charlie. With wit and empathy, Dara's cozy sequel is a pitch-perfect mix of charm and emotional depth that reiterates the importance of living every day not without fear of death but in spite of it. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer