“This is no how-to manual.” Right. Playing Dead is no more not a how-to guide than is The Anarchist Cookbook. Nevertheless, here you will learn (or learn about) the dark art of fabricating your own disappearance. Or, should you wish to go six feet deeper, how to commit pseudocide — fake suicide. For those who prefer the step-by-step approach, there is one of those if/then diagrams, with boxes of questions and arrows that chart your next step depending upon your answer, a map through the mazy minefield of death fraud. Elizabeth Greenwood endeavors to kill herself. That’s commitment, even is she’s only playing.

What do Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakki , Juliet Capulet, Tom Sawyer, and Dan Draper share in common? They all faked their death. Playing dead is a hoary old trick, running across species — possums, of course, but it’s also practiced by lemon sharks, snakes, goats, and a passel of others — and serving as a protonarrative for many a myth. It was an exit strategy that Greenwood considered when her student loans threatened to reduce her life to debt management, half steps toward a vanishing point. No, “the dross of life would not inflict itself upon me: I would arrange and edit to suit my specifications. Faking death would be a refusal, a way to reject the dreary facts.”

But Greenwood didn’t rack up a “$100,000 deficit . . . (Well, actually closer to a half million after the lifetime of accrued credit)” via schooling without learning she had to do her homework, and so the “journey through the world of death fraud” begins. Playing Dead may be Greenwood’s first book, yet it is smart as a fox, displaying a wicked sense of humor braided with rue. It can’t help but be existential — of the plight-of-the-individual, assumption-of-unknowable-responsibility school — considering the subject matter. Still, Greenwood lifts the act of falling off the face of the earth from its melancholic slough to higher ground by telling us stories of how to pull it off without pulling the plug and how not to, true stories told by those who have done it and those paid to discover if someone is cheating the reaper (that would be the insurance company).

There are an average of 90,000 missing people in/from the United States at any one time. A very small percentage of them will have gone willfully absent for some reason, though a very significant percentage will be on the run from money trouble. “Money isn’t everything,” said one of Greenwood’s more roguish death fakers from money-poor northern England, “but it’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent of everything.” One moment before you climb on a high horse. “Greed is easy to see in others when you have enough. But when your origins are more humble, the goalpost of ‘enough’ moves constantly,” writes Greenwood. Wise beyond her years, she makes good use of that $100,000 education and remembers growing up in hardscrabble Worcester, Massachusetts as bleak as any Brontëan childhood.

Then again, there is greed. Your Ponzi scheme has fallen apart. As you enter the courtroom, an FBI agent leans in and whispers, “I have two words for you: Costa Rica.” What to do? You look under “privacy consultant” in the Yellow Pages. Greenwood finds one such — a blustery gent with high self-regard but a privacy consultant’s privacy consultant — who takes her through the paces. To start with, disappearing and pseudocide are different animals. Unless you have good (or no-good) reason to fake your death, disappearing is the way to go — from an incessant stalker, for instance. Dissolving your identity, physically and digitally, is not a crime. It isn’t simple, either, thus the consultant who destroys as much information on you as possible while sowing false leads. Then you must live off the grid, an austere ecosystem for sure: you must work off the books, pay all your bills through an LLC, leave behind almost everything, though there are devious ways of making contact with loved ones. File for any piece of paper — like a library card — under a false identity, and you have committed fraud. Now you are a criminal, a like-it-or-not fugitive.

Faking death, on the other hand, is a science. Brain surgery science, requiring an expert to kill you and appreciating that an expert will be tracking you if you are illegally skipping town or cashing in an insurance policy. For this chapter, Greenwood taps the experience of a private investigator who specializes in surprising the undead. The biggest problem with faking death is the need for others to help you. That might mean procuring a surrogate body; it will certainly require false documents, including a certificate of death. These co-conspirators will be of unsavory ilk. They are not your friends; you are another cash cow. Greenwood sits agog as the investigator fires questions at her: Can you leave your life behind, never see your family and friends again? Are you in good health, with enough cash to live for two or three years, with someone you trust to file the insurance claim, and an alternative identity prepared (one that you have taken a couple of years to construct)? What about your Internet presence, how about fingerprints on file? Have you an intelligent way to die? Hiking is a good one, but a natural disaster is better. How’s your conscience, your willingness to risk disgrace and imprisonment?

Greenwood’s storytelling invites you to participate. It challenges you to participate, and it  takes sauce simply to enter these precincts. It is inadvisable, however, to follow Greenwood as she takes the investigative reporter’s dangerous plunge. (This is not to say that Greenwood is as flawless as a Fabergé egg. She pops some corn — “Perhaps faking death and disappearing appeals to the part of us that still carves authenticity and unfettered solitude, the truest antidote to loneliness” — and serves forth her share of floppers: “the thought undulating through my skull like squid ink.”) She travels to the Philippines to fake her death. No spoilers, but let’s say when she returns to the United States and shows some documents to her private investigator friend, he notes that “this one sucks. They actually double printed it with an inkjet printer.” How’s your willingness to risk disgrace and imprisonment? “Every debt has to be repaid. Repaying one’s debts, according to Plato, at least, is the true definition of justice,” Greenwood decides. See what an education will get you?

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Mercury is Margot Livesey’s eighth novel, and just like the previous seven, it is completely different from its predecessors. Her books have been peopled by a most variegated lot, among them an evil child, a lunatic, a blackmailer, an amnesiac, a control freak, a couple of ghosts, and, last time, in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a mid-twentieth-century version of Jane Eyre. Now we find ourselves sucked deep into the lives of an optometrist, his equestrian wife, and their two children.

Scottish-born Donald Stevenson was brought to this country by his parents when he was ten, a temporary move that turned permanent. It was wrenching, above all because it separated him from his best friend, a boy he finally stopped writing to when he had to admit that he wasn’t coming back. Throwing up barriers, we discover, is Donald’s way of dealing with painful emotions. Now he’s a grown man but once again in a state of shuttered bereavement, this time for his father, who died fairly recently from Parkinson’s disease. We learn that Donald has, in fact, shaped the last several years of his and his family’s life around his father’s decline. He moved them all to be closer to his parents, gave up the medical discipline of ophthalmology for optometry with its shorter, more predictable hours, and visited the increasingly disabled man as often as possible.

On the distaff side of this tale is Donald’s wife, Viv, who left a well-paying job in mutual funds to run a stable with her friend Claudia, a business she loves though it pays peanuts. Like her husband, she, too, has a devastating loss in her past, that of an adored horse who had to be put down as a result of her own mistakes in training. Now she has fallen in love with Mercury, a beautiful thoroughbred boarded at the stable and owned by a woman called Hilary. Hilary, not a horsewoman herself, is glad to have someone exercise the creature, which has come to her via an inheritance with its own tragic details.

Other crucial characters spin off their own little side plots, all of which converge on the fateful main one. Claudia, Viv’s partner, is involved with a married man; Hilary, the owner of Mercury, falls in love with Jack, one of Donald’s former patients, now blind. There is also a young stable girl, Charlie, who has become as smitten with Mercury as Viv has — and that cannot bode well.

While Donald flounders in grief, Viv becomes increasingly intoxicated by the dream that she can redo the past and train a champion: “I was going to ride him to victory . . . I was going to fulfill the promise of my second life.” She neglects her family, throws around money they cannot afford to spend, and becomes paranoid that harm will come to the horse. Those fears grow as she detects that someone has visited the horse in the night. Still, Viv loses sight of what should be the most disquieting fact of all: Mercury does not actually belong to her. Step by step, Livesey brilliantly assembles a truly painful and frightening picture of delusion. A sequence of fateful acts follow, leading to tragedy and a terrible moral conundrum.

Most of the novel is presented as an account written by Donald after the fact, but as he is the most judicious of narrators, he includes a long letter from Viv. This allows her to offer her version, one that fills in emotional detail — not Donald’s strong suit. His manner of narration has a nineteenth-century Caledonian air, one marked by a knell of dark foreboding. He points to incidents that would turn out to have dire repercussions and to the signs he missed of coming disaster. He was blind, he sees now, to what was going on around him. It is a failing made almost ludicrous considering that his prize possession, his totem, really, is a model of an eye, twelve times the size of an actual one. “[W]e think we see with our eyes,” he explains to a patient, “but really we see with our brains.”

In addition to sight — or lack of it — the novel’s other governing motif is Mercury, the implications and connotations of which are thoroughly unpacked by the diligent Donald — he’s that kind of guy and Livesey is that kind of writer. There’s Mercury the horse, the swiftest of the gods and their messenger, and mercury the element that, as Donald reminds himself, is a poison that causes death and — yes — blindness. And there is Mercury, the planet and part of a system of bodies, each affecting the others. Donald gets all this going, trying to figure out, in his weirdly analytic way, how to understand his life and that of those around him.

These strands of allusion and connotation — some as subtle as gossamer, some as conspicuous as a hawser — contribute to the novel’s deftly manipulated tension. I cannot in good conscience reveal more of the plot. I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events. So, I leave this pleasure for you to experience in its unadulterated form.

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