#1 New York Times bestselling author Marshall Karp crafts a world where revenge, love, and survival collide.

Maggie Dunn has it all: an adoring husband, a loving family, and a rewarding job as mayor of a thriving upstate New York town. But it all comes crashing down when she is diagnosed with the same fatal blood disease that claimed her mother.

As a teenager, Maggie watched in horror as "a parade of perfumed piranhas in pretty pink dresses" flocked to her grieving father like stray cats to an overturned milk truck. And when the wrong woman stepped in to take her mother's place, the consequences were devastating. Maggie refuses to let the same thing happen to her family.

With months left to live, she puts the well-being of her soon-to-be-widowed husband and motherless children above her own. Maggie vows to find the next Mrs. Dunn before she dies. Her end-of-life quest takes a dark turn as long-held secrets begin to surface, and Maggie is caught up in a whirlwind of duplicity, betrayal, and murder. Make that plural. Murders.

Marshall Karp has created a genre-bending novel that is both heart-warming and heart-pounding, as he weaves love and family values with one woman's stop-at-nothing desperation. Rich with Karp's deft array of three-dimensional characters and his signature biting humor, Don't Tell Me How to Die has so many twists and turns, you'll swear he wrote it with a corkscrew. And the book's jaw-dropping conclusion is bound to stay with you long after you've ripped through the final pages.

NOT EVERY LOVE STORY HAS A HAPPY ENDING