Bone Fire by Mark Spragg

This is a good book, not a great book. That said, I liked it. More importantly, it made me think beyond the confines of the novel and it's story. The title alludes to a practice that appears to have roots in many cultures--the building of a huge ceremonial fire to burn bodies. There is something to that in that the characters in this novel are gradually falling apart. They could use a few culturally bound exercises to help them contextualize what they are going through.
Here is the setting: The town is Ishawooa, Wyoming and the protagonist is Sheriff Crane Carlson. The book opens with him finding the corpse of a teen amidst the wreckage of a meth lab. We never really solve that one, but it is emblematic of Crane's personal dissolution, his bonefire of sorts. Crane has just learned he has ALS, which he reacts to in two ways. He plots his suicide, and reconnects with his first wife, who it becomes clear he should have worked harder to ahng onto. His current spouse, Jean, is a nasty vulnerable drunken pothead outraged that her husband is reaching out to her predecessor and not her--and she knows how to get even. She is a great example of borderline personality disorder, adult sub-type.
This drama is juxtaposed against someone who is dying at an expected time of life and who is struggling to do it right. Jean's daughter, Griff, a bone sculptor drops out of her eastern college to return to Wyoming to care for her dying octogenarian grandfather Einar Gilkyson. Einar loves her but pushes her away--in a nice way that allows her to find a path forward in her life. Instead, Einar asks his estranged lesbian sister Marin, whose long time love just died, to come care for him--and repair their sibling relationship. There are cautiously hopeful moments in the book, despite overwhelming obstacles.
The book lays out the challenge that death and dying present, but it doesn't do as nice a job of answering the questions that it raises. That is the flaw of the story, but it is raw and real and emotive, and worth reading.