Remains of the Day is a book by John Kiriakou, announced for publication by Simon and Schuster in March 2026 and described by Kiriakou as “a definitive guide to the historic cemeteries of Washington DC” — the first installment in a planned series.[1] Kiriakou produced a podcast series, Grave Concerns, as a companion to the book, profiling notable figures buried in the capital’s cemeteries, including Gore Vidal.[1]
Kiriakou has said the planned second book in the series will cover the Mafia graves of New York City.[2]
Origin: a childhood cemetery discovery
Kiriakou traces his fascination with cemeteries to age nine, when he went looking for salamanders in a cemetery near his childhood home and found one under a rock beside a small tombstone bearing a Congressional Medal of Honor medallion. He and his mother went to the library to learn the story: the grave belonged to a local farmer who had fought with the 4th Pennsylvania Infantry and captured a Confederate battle flag at the Battle of Petersburg.[3]
He says he decided to write the book during COVID, after searching online and finding nobody had ever written a book specifically about the cemeteries of Washington, D.C. — despite dozens of existing books about Arlington National Cemetery alone.[4]
Writing and publication
His first seven books were about the CIA; Remains of the Day was his eighth, written in six weeks rather than the nine months a book normally takes him.[5][6] After months of research, he identified 250 fascinating, largely unknown people buried in Washington, D.C. cemeteries for the book.[7]
His publisher, Simon & Schuster, was impressed enough by the manuscript to commission four more cemetery books in the same vein: Whispers in the Dirt, covering the Mafia graves of New York City; and further volumes on the historic cemeteries of Chicago, the country-western graves of Nashville, and America’s most notorious serial killers.[6][8][9][10] As of one 2025 interview he was 50% done with Whispers in the Dirt.[8]