Undertaker Jonas Crow is charged with transporting the coffin of an ex-miner become millionaire back to the mining vein that made his fortune. The funeral should have been a calm affair, but there's an unexpected turn of events: on the eve of his death, Joe Cusco swallowed all his gold, so as to carry it with him for all eternity. Unfortunately, the secret was leaked, provoking the fury of all the miners of Anoki City. They can't just leave such a fortune to be buried while they're sweating their souls away in the mining shafts! As Jonas says, "death never comes alone..."

Undertaker Jonas Crow, along with the English governess Rose and her Chinese maid Lin, have to get the gold-filled corps of old Mr. Cusco back to the mining vein they call 'Red Chance'. They have three days. Three days, a hearse, 50 miles ahead of them, and an entire town of discontented miners to deal with!

When an old colonel informs Jonas Crow that the so-called "Ogre of Sutter Camp" is still alive and well, he's not exactly pleased, to say the least. His troubled past from his fighting days in the American Civil War comes back to the surface, forcing Jonas into a man-hunt, and to face his own regrets...

Dr. Jeronimus Quint has an unusual business model that Hippocrates would frown upon: he creates his own patients by injuring people whose lives then depend on him. His latest victims are Jonas Crow, Undertaker, and Rose, his English companion. Without the best medical attention—i.e. Quint's—each might lose a limb, or even die, from gangrene. He's kidnapped Rose and is withholding his sado-surgical skills while Jonas and his cohort Lin pursue him and his captive. With ferrymen and lumberjacks in front, angry lawmen behind, and a leg killing him from within, the Undertaker hopes to survive long enough to make Jeronimus Quint his next customer.

Lin and Rose have gone their separate ways, so Jonas Crow is left alone with his hearse and Jed, his pet vulture. Winter has set in and there's plenty of work to do—plenty of bodies to bury. When a childhood friend, Sid, looks him up and offers him a dangerous job, Jonas eventually agrees to it. Time, however, changes all things, loyalties included. Sid may not be trustworthy, but he was right about one thing—Jonas is the only undertaker in the Old West crazy enough to go after a corpse in Apache territory.

After Rose Prairie leaves him, Jonas Crow sinks deep into a hole. That's when he's brought on for a special assignment by Sid Beauchamp, a friend in misfortune from his youth and now the sheriff of Tucson: to recover the corpse of Caleb Barclay, enslaved and tortured by the Indians. But things get complicated when it turns out that Caleb wasn't a slave at all, but had married into the Apache tribe, and he was killed by none other than Sid himself. With Sid and his well-heeled bride-to-be at the helm, Tucson seems on the verge of great things... But as a blizzard hits, so do Jonas and Caleb's widow, the fierce Salvaje, and bullets and vengeance storm the winter skies of the Arizona desert.

Drowning in sorrow, regret, and longing—and bottle after bottle of whisky—Jonas Crow can see no future for himself without Rose Prairie, the woman he never even had a chance to love. When word arrives that she may be in Texas, he heads straight there. In the topsy-turvy world of post-Civil War Texas, abortion is legal but firearms are not. When Jonas arrives, he finds a destitute town full of hopelessness and a young crusader on a mission to do God's work and rid the Lone Star State of vice. His reunion with Rose doesn't go as planned, and as is his wont, he finds himself caught up in battle that isn't his, yet one he must nevertheless join if he—and his love—are to have any chance of surviving.