A darkly comic foray into the world of men and women who fake their own deaths, the consultants who help them disappear, and the private investigators whoāll stop at nothing to bring them back to life.
āA delightful read for anyone tantalized by the prospect of disappearing without a trace.ā āErik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake
āDelivers all the lo-fi spy shenanigans and caught-red-handed schadenfreude youāre hoping for.ā āNPR
āA lively romp.ā āThe Boston Globe
āGrim fun.ā āThe New York Times
āBrilliant topic, absorbing book.ā āThe Seattle Times
āThe most literally escapist summer read you could hope for.ā āThe Paris Review
Is it still possible to fake your own death in the twenty-first century? With six figures of student loan debt, Elizabeth Greenwood was tempted to find out. So off she sets on a darkly comic foray into the world of death fraud, where for $30,000 a consultant can make you disappearābut your suspicious insurance company might hire a private detective to dig up your coffin...only to find it filled with rocks.
Greenwood tracks down a British man who staged a kayaking accident and then returned to live in his own house while all his neighbors thought he was dead. She takes a call from Michael Jackson (no, heās not deadāor so her new acquaintances would have her believe), stalks message boards for people contemplating pseudocide, and gathers intel on black market morgues in the Philippines, where she may or may not obtain some fraudulent goodies of her own. Along the way, she learns that love is a much less common motive than money, and that making your death look like a drowning virtually guarantees that youāll be caught. (Disappearing while hiking, however, is a way great to go.)
Playing Dead is a charmingly bizarre investigation in the vein of Jon Ronson and Mary Roach into our all-too-human desire to escape from the lives we lead, and the men and women desperate enough to give up their livesāand their familiesāto start again.