Nick Graves is a Mourner. His profession is to arrange funerals and organize gatherings for wakes as well as hangings, supplementing his meagre income by making coffins. He has come to this job, a profession he learned from his father, after years making his living with a fast draw and a cool nerve. Now he wants to forget his past, forget the destruction he has caused by assuming a simple life and a quiet vocation. But the job he takes in new town also includes some old problems. The town is stocked full of corrupt men, men who will make it very difficult for Nick to continue the family trade, men who will force him to return to his old profession, when he created corpses instead of cared for them.