Death and Other Occupational Hazards by Veronika Dapunt

Discover a darkly comic speculative murder mystery from an exciting new novelist, perfect for fans of Good Omens and Lucifer.

People have a few ideas about Death, and the worst by far is a skeleton in a black potato sack. If she's lucky, she gets a scythe. The truth: she's just a woman doing a job and she's very good at it.

Until she takes time off to live as a human and everything falls apart. Someone's killing people not on her schedule (well, not yet anyway) and with no thanks to the Temp she left in charge, it's up to her to make things right.

With the help of her oh-so-sanctimonious sister, Life, and a charming (sexy) parasitologist, Death must stop the killer before it's too late. That's if she can defeat her greatest challenge yet - human bureaucracy.

Who better to investigate a murder than Death herself?

Veronika is a British-Austrian fiction writer of Ladin heritage. Her debut novel, Death and Other Occupational Hazards won the UK's 2023 Comedy Women in Print Prize Runner-Up. She has always had a love of the darkly comic and the absurd, quite possibly the reason why her first career was in law. In the past, she has worked for the European Union and as Head of Global Business Affairs at a luxury goods business, where she was involved in high-profile projects like international fashion shows, the Oscars and the Bond franchise. She is a graduate of Oxford University and Faber Academy, and her short story Echoes was long-listed for the 2023 Bath Short Story Award.


Veronika lives in London with an opinionated mini-schnauzer called Cosette.