Healing the Dead by D.F. Bailey (Douglas & McIntyre)—"the screaming came in a raw, primal fury"—is a coming-of-age melodrama with all the maddeningly irrelevant details with which melodramas are wont to fill out their pages: no one speaks without sipping a coffee, smiling or slapping their thighs or performing some other auxiliary action meant solely to convey the spurious sense of realism that sloppy writers substitute for imagination. This is a book wholly without silences.