What About the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski

Published by Atlantic Crime on September 2, 2025

What About the Bodies is built on dark humor and strong characters. Two characters are kids. Reed is autistic and Billy speaks with a stutter. Reed’s mother just died (a death for which Reed is blamed) and he’s lobbying to stay with his brother Greg, who wants to put him in a home for disabled adults. Billy’s mother, Carla, is trying to open a midscale restaurant in a barn she purchased, but she’s running out of money. Billy distracts her from that problem when he confesses that a body is buried in their back yard.

Liz is a singer-songwriter who has a chance to impress a music producer in Nashville if she can find a way to get there. She has no money and, when she gets her car repaired on credit, the mechanic’s carelessness causes her car to erupt in a ball of flame. When the mechanic insists on being paid anyway, her not-really-friend Luke decides to make a quick profit selling drugs but makes the mistake of transporting them in a truck that has been reported stolen. Since Liz is driving the truck, her odds of meeting the producer, like her car, seem to have gone up in flames.

The characters deal with one mishap after another as they work toward their goals. Subplots unfold as the characters pursue their adventures. Reed wants to place a doll in his mother’s casket (he made it for her in grade school and she told him she wanted to be buried with it) but the casket has already been sealed. Reed is forced to detour from his trip to the cemetery when his high school nemesis, now a small-town cop named Dan, tries to bully a Black family.

Carla and Billy decide to move the buried body but get into a scrap with a biker gang while the rotting corpse is stinking up the trunk of Carla’s car. To get money, Liz and Luke decide to steal something that Liz owns by breaking into her father’s house, which is now controlled by her stepmother. That criminal escapade, like all their money-raising plans before it, goes sideways.

The various adventures merge and diverge in amusing ways as characters drift together and apart. When it seems that things could not go worse for a character, they do. Perseverance is a theme that runs through the story. Never give up: even if you stutter, even if you throw fits when things to wrong, even if you have more debt than money and no clear way to achieve a goal. You can’t get there by quitting.

Carla and Liz use their wits to solve their problems, while Billy and Reed are surprisingly resourceful. All the key characters are drawn with realism, encouraging the reader to invest in their lives. They’re fundamentally kind people who occasionally make mistakes, as do we all. In one of my favorite scenes, Reed recalls how a young woman in high school danced with him, an act of kindness he has never forgotten. Ken Jaworowski seems to be illustrating the truth that a simple act of kindness can stay with another person forever. It might even change a life.

If reading promotes thinking that might make us better people, What About the Bodies? could be a life-changing novel for some readers. At the very least, it tells a fun story about decent people who overcome obstacles as they tenaciously pursue their own versions of a successful life without sacrificing their humanity.

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