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Officially Dead
Paperback
Classic FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 25 2026
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
He survived the war. He survived captivity. He didn't survive the paperwork.
In October 2012, Sergeant First Class James Chadwick was declared killed in action in Afghanistan. A body was recovered. A flag was folded. A check was cashed.
Ten years later, Chadwick walks into a Brooklyn law office and says five words that will destroy several lives, including his own: I wasn't killed. I was just reported that way.
His wife has remarried. His life insurance - $400,000 - paid for a house in Connecticut. His death gratuity built a new life. His name is on a plaque at the VA. And every database in America - military, civilian, federal - says the same thing: DECEASED.
I don't have a form for a ghost, an ICE agent tells him.
When attorney Sarah Darvell takes his case, she discovers that proving a man is alive may be harder than proving he's dead - because the government, the insurance company, and his own wife all have a financial interest in keeping him buried.
OFFICIALLY DEAD is a novel about identity, money, and the distance between the country a soldier fights for and the country that forgets him. Freely adapted from Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert and set in contemporary Brooklyn, it asks a question that is two hundred years old and has never been answered:
What happens when the dead come back - and the living don't want them?
For readers of Phil Klay, Denis Johnson, and Richard Ford.
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