In Ashes to Ashes, due for 2005 publication, Harry and Naomi innocently arrange for the cremation of one of their recently deceased friends, a neighbor in their retirement community in a Boston suburb. They stumble across a crafty scheme of a famous mobster, Buddy Durgin, who has been on the lam for the last twelve years. He is being sought by the Boston Police and the FBI (#2 on its ”Most Wanted List”) for twenty-one murders, dating back two decades. Buddy plans to utilize the same crematorium as a way to dispose of currently and soon to be created corpses. He reasons, logically, that except for a vase of ashes with all DNA destroyed, there will be no evidence such murders--a big improvement over the previous twenty-one cases in all of which body parts were subsequently discovered in spite of every precaution he had taken to hide them. Buddy discovers that Harry and Naomi are onto his scheme so he decides to dispose of them as his next victims. As tension, as well as body counts, mount, Harry and Naomi, again utilizing Naomi’s investigative gifts, “help” Lieutenant Bill O’Halloran of the Boston Police Department to bring Buddy to his just desserts.
