A novella and four short stories by my favorite undertaker/author— his first collection of fiction.  While I still feel he is most skilled as an essayist and then a poet, he brings the same wisdom about living and dying and the same broad experience of both that his day job has brought him.  He writes beautifully about sex and marriage, about relationships (especially father and son in ‘Catch and Release’) and about loss.  Focusing on a single character (a son mourning his father, an undertaker collecting the body of a young woman he had loved and who had been shot by her husband, a thrice-married man living alone by a lake, a U of M famous poet professor obsessed with a Jamaican adolescent on Mackinac Island, and the writer of Good Riddance in the eponymous novella), Lynch manages to spin a tale and make trenchant observations that cut through trite concepts and illuminate with wisdom.