Zig & Nola

About the Zig & Nola series

Also marketed under its first book's title as the "Escape Artist" series, this trilogy pairs Jim "Zig" Zigarowski, a mortician at the U.S. military's official mortuary at Dover Air Force Base who prepares America's war dead and quietly investigates anything that looks wrong about a death, with Nola Brown, the U.S. Army's reclusive artist-in-residence, whose sketchbook skills mask a far more dangerous set of talents and a past she works hard to keep buried. The Escape Artist opens when a body arrives at Dover for a routine case and Zig realizes the woman in the casket isn't who the paperwork says she is -- setting off a conspiracy that pulls in Nola, believed dead, and forces the two into an uneasy partnership. The Lightning Rod and The Viper continue their partnership across further investigations into buried military and family secrets.

Meltzer built the series around his own research into Dover's real port mortuary operations and its unusually intimate role in how the military and the families of the fallen confront death, giving the books a procedural texture distinct from his earlier Washington-conspiracy novels.