Characters
Charlie Asher: The protagonist of the story, Charlie Asher is the owner of Asher's Secondhand, the thrift shop inherited from his father, where much of the story takes place. Charlie became a death merchant upon witnessing Minty Fresh take his wife's soul object as she died. Over the course of the story, Charlie raises his daughter Sophie while dealing with the ramifications of his soul collecting job.
Minty Fresh: Minty is a nearly seven foot tall African American with a penchant for wearing mint green suits. He is, like Charlie, a death merchant. He runs a second-hand record store in the Castro district of San Francisco.
Jane Asher: Charlie's sister. She helps Charlie raise Sophie when she's around, and she has a bad habit of 'borrowing' Charlie's suits.
Audrey: Tibetan monk with power over the movement of souls and creator of animal chimeras that mysteriously appear.
Detective Alphonse Rivera: A detective with the SFPD, Rivera suspects Charlie of involvement in a number of suspicious deaths.
Ray Macy: One of Charlie's two employees, Ray is a middle-aged retired cop who spends time online connecting with 'desperate Filipinas.'
Lily: Charlie's other employee, Lily is a goth teenager and later a goth chef. She is the only person besides Minty Fresh and Sophie who knows that Charlie is a death merchant.
Mrs. Vladlena Korjev and Mrs. Ling: Middle-aged women who live in Charlie's building and frequently care for Sophie while providing comic relief.
The Morrigan: Babd, Macha, and Nemain, Celtic war deities and denizens of the underworld. Along with Orcus, they are the villains of the novel.
Orcus: Husband of the Morrigan, and powerful force of darkness.
Orcus was a god of the underworld, punisher of broken oaths in Etruscan and Roman mythology. As with Hades, the name of the god was also used for the underworld itself. Eventually, he was conflated with Dīs Pater and Pluto.
Christopher Moore is an American writer. He was born in Toledo, Ohio. He grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University and Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California.
Eva Tanguay was a Canadian singer and entertainer who billed herself as "the girl who made vaudeville famous". She was known as "The Queen of Vaudeville" during the height of her popularity from the early 1900s until the early 1920s. Tanguay also appeared in films, and was the first performer to achieve national mass-media celebrity, with publicists and newspapers covering her tours from coast-to-coast, out-earning the likes of contemporaries Enrico Caruso and Harry Houdini at one time, and being described by Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations", as "our first symbol of emergence from the Victorian age."
Center Stage is a 2000 American teen drama film directed by Nicholas Hytner about a group of young ballet dancers from various backgrounds who enroll at the fictitious American Ballet Academy in New York City. The film explores the issues and difficulties in the world of professional dance, and how each individual copes with the stresses. This movie was Zoe Saldana's and Amanda Schull's film debut.
Coyote Blue is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1994.
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating was an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.
Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1995. It combines elements of the supernatural and of the romance novel.
Empire Falls is a 2005 American television miniseries directed by Fred Schepisi and written by Richard Russo, based on Russo's 2001 novel of the same name. It aired on HBO in two parts, from May 28 to May 29, 2005. The miniseries was nominated for and won multiple awards, including ten Primetime Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.
Dirty Harry is an American neo-noir action thriller film series featuring San Francisco Police Department Homicide Division Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan. There are five films: Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988). Clint Eastwood portrayed Callahan in all five films and directed Sudden Impact.
The Dark Age is a trilogy by Mark Chadbourn set around the beginning of the third millennium. While the previous series was a clear fantasy story, this has strings of gothic horror and existentialism woven into it.
You Suck: A Love Story is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore.
Empire Falls is a 2001 novel written by Richard Russo. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002, and follows the story of Miles Roby in a fictional, small blue-collar town in Maine and the people, places, and the past surrounding him, as manager of the Empire Grill diner.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is a television comedy-drama series, produced by the BBC in conjunction with HBO, and based on the novels of the same name by Alexander McCall Smith. The novels focus on the story of a detective agency opened by Mma Ramotswe and her courtship with the mechanic Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni. The series was filmed on location in Botswana and was seen as one of the first major film or television productions to be undertaken in Botswana.
Death is frequently imagined as a personified force. In some mythologies, a character known as the Grim Reaper causes the victim's death by coming to collect that person's soul. Other beliefs hold that the spectre of death is only a psychopomp, a benevolent figure who serves to gently sever the last ties between the soul and the body, and to guide the deceased to the afterlife, without having any control over when or how the victim dies. Death is most often personified in male form, although in certain cultures death is perceived as female. Death is also portrayed as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Most claims of its appearance occur in states of near-death.
The murder of Sophie Lancaster occurred in England in August 2007. The victim and her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, were attacked by a group of teenage boys while walking through Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Rossendale, Lancashire, on 11 August 2007. As a result of the severe head injuries Lancaster sustained in the attack, she went into a coma from which she never regained consciousness, and died of her injuries thirteen days later. The police said the attack may have been linked to the couple wearing gothic fashion and being members of the goth subculture.
Bite Me: A Love Story is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore. It debuted at number 5 on The New York Times Best Seller list on April 11, 2010.
The Cuckoo's Calling is a 2013 crime fiction novel written by J. K. Rowling, and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. It is the first novel in the Cormoran Strike series of detective novels and was followed by The Silkworm in 2014, Career of Evil in 2015, Lethal White in 2018, Troubled Blood in 2020 and The Ink Black Heart in 2022. A seventh book The Running Grave was released on 26 September 2023.
The Monogram Murders is a 2014 mystery novel by British writer Sophie Hannah featuring characters created by Agatha Christie. It is the first in Hannah's series of Hercule Poirot books, continuation novels sanctioned by the estate of Agatha Christie. The novel was followed by Closed Casket (2016), The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018), and The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020).
Closed Casket is a work of detective fiction by British writer Sophie Hannah, featuring Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Hannah is the first author to have been authorised by the Christie estate to write new stories for her characters. Hannah's work closely resembles the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in its structure and tropes. Closed Casket even includes a plan of the house in which the murder takes place; such plans were sometimes used in Golden Age novels to aid the reader in their solving of the mystery puzzle.
