Introduction: Clara restores the dead to look almost alive. One night, she nearly joins them-and Death breaks the rules to bring her back. Clara works in a morgue, painting warmth into cold skin, smoothing over the violence that stole breath from the bodies before her. She's quiet, clinical, and not afraid of death-just more familiar with it than most. Some say she's detached. Others say she's gifted. Clara knows better. She simply understands the dead in a way the living never could. But something is changing. The bodies arriving on her table bear strange marks. Her dreams are slipping-too vivid, too visceral. And when she's pulled beneath the water by unseen hands, she doesn't wake up on her own. She wakes in Death's arms. Now Clara is being watched by something not quite human. Something with a name. And it seems her survival wasn't a mistake. Lush, haunting, and sharply intimate, Stiff Beauty is a gothic slow-burn where death isn't the end-but the beginning of a story Clara was never supposed to be part of....