The Scared Stiff — Judson Jack Carmichael

Masterfully devised, wildly comic, and nonstop suspenseful, this madcap tale maps the consequences of an amiable schemer's notion that he might be better off dead -- and then the more alarming discovery that he's not dead enough. Con artistry having failed yet again to make Barry Lee rich quick, he finds himself with only one asset left: his life. Or rather, the insurance on it. So he and his beautiful South American wife, Lola, set out to play the globalization of the insurance industry to their fiduciary advantage. In Lola's native Guerrara, where corruption comes disguised as efficiency and a coroner thinks it unnecessary to see the corpse before issuing a death certificate, they successfully stage Barry's spectacular and very public accidental death. However, Barry's afterlife proves to be more problematic, especially when Lola's blunt-minded and ham-fisted cousins figure there's less profit in a con than in a corpse. Running through a series of identities from a taxi driver to a Hollywood movie producer, and running out of lives, Barry strives to escape the harrowing and often hilarious effects of his own demise.