SCARED STIFF

Sex and scatology are the order of the day as a newly minted Deputy Coroner tries to clear a former colleague of murder.

When last spotted, ER nurse Mattie Winston (Working Stiff, 2009) had quit her hospital job after finding her co-worker Karen Owenby “playing with a certain private organ” belonging to her surgeon husband David, taken a job working for Sorenson’s diminutive, gay medical examiner, Izzy Rybarceski, and developed a serious case of the hots for Detective Steve Hurley. In this installment, things get seriously weird. Mattie is called to pry the decomposed bodies of Gerald and Bitsy Heinrich from their Cadillac Escalade, gets “death goo” on her butt and maggots down her ample cleavage, and strips off her scrubs in the middle of the crash scene. After her own vehicle is totaled, she hires elderly cabbie Bjorn to squire her around town in exchange for periodically emptying his urine catheter bag. The Heinrich offspring, battling over their parents’ estate, are led by alcoholic Easton, who drops his trousers, wiggles his wanker at the cops and starts a melee worthy of a hockey game. But when radiology tech Erik Tolliver is accused of murdering his estranged wife Shannon, waitress at local eatery Dairy Airs, Mattie gets down to business, enlisting her lecherous brother-in-law Lucien to defend her fellow health-care worker while she searches for other solutions to the grisly crime.

Ryan dedicates Mattie’s second case to her mom, leaving interested readers to imagine what maternal bond generated this distinctively gross-out cozy sensibility.