Think again before faking your own drowning

In Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud author Elizabeth Greenwood recounts several stories of individuals attempting, with varying results, to fake their own deaths. As it turns out, it’s a hard thing to do successfully and there are many ways in which such attempts frequently fail.

(Hint: If you want to fake your death, pass on drowning. Bodies are almost always recovered and it’s suspicious when they’re not.)

There are some interesting facts in the book about death fraud but, unfortunately, not enough to fill even this short, 246 page book. The author fluffs out the narrative with too many stories about how and where she met her sources. The book would have been better presented as a series of magazine articles.