Kindly Necromancers

[jeff_wilson]

Anita Blake of the eponymous novel and comic book series is a mostly kindly necromancer. Her United States has very little tolerance for doing bad things with magic, demons, and the animated dead (although vampires are treated as living people). She has a special sense about spirits of the dead and is often able to bolster them to the point where they can communicate, and at least one of the books opens with some exhumed decedent being raised in order to be deposed for a lawsuit over their estate. She rather more often gets called in when a body turns up with either no evidence of how they died or of some new impossible way, and hopes the killer was confident enough to attack from the front.

Ned in the "Pushing Daisies" TV show has the gift to revive dead things with his touch, but if touched again they are dead forever. If they remain untouched for 60 seconds, another of its kind dies to take its place. Ned was making a marginal living as a piemaker serving pies with absolutely the freshest ingredients until he teamed with a PI to touch dead people, again hoping the killer was confident enough to attack from the front.

Then there was the woman of Endor....