The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 8

Shigo kekkon-marrying the dead! It's a quaint old country custom in Japan that's becoming the next big fad in Tokyo . . . and that makes it the business of the Corpse Delivery Service! And meanwhile back on campus, since they're technically a college club, the kids from Kurosagi host a membership drive at the start of the new semester! But you've got to like corpses, you know.

The new set of “deliveries” (chapters) about five contemporary Buddhist students using paranormal powers to solve murder mysteries serves romance with the usual chills and laughter. In the first, single-delivery story, the group tries recruiting new members to get a bigger campus meeting room; the one good prospect is pretty but spectrally elusive. In the following three-delivery adventure, they have to deal with big-time Yakuza, and the three-parter after it involves encountering an enterprise tangential to theirs. In all three stories, a KCDS-er becomes smitten as the plot unfolds, and distinctive Japanese funerary traditions are illustrated as well as explained. What a rich series this is. --Ray Olson