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 — subsequently titled Whispers in the Dirt.[2]
He has since described the series as larger than one sequel: Simon & Schuster “liked it so much they commissioned four more.”[3] The format changed with the reception. Remains of the Day was written as a field guide, eight inches by five, “so that you can stick it in your back pocket” — but the publisher liked it enough to make it a coffee-table book instead, with the practical consequence Kiriakou notes wryly: “you’re going to have to like lug it into the cemetery with you.”[4] He was taking his own photographs for the volumes, and gives his rate of cemetery visits as at least weekly at home and almost daily when abroad.[5][6]
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.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9][10] After months of research, he identified 250 fascinating, largely unknown people buried in Washington, D.C. cemeteries for the book.[11]
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.[10][12][13][14] As of one 2025 interview he was 50% done with Whispers in the Dirt.[12]
Postponed
In March 2026 John Kiriakou reported that the book, which had been due out within days, had been postponed by about two months “for reasons that are inexplicable to me.”[15]
Asked about it later in the same programme, he gave the explanation he had been given by the publisher: the delay was not the publisher’s doing but Amazon’s, which had been “slow in the uptake to order from the warehouse.” The date moved from late March to late June. His reaction: “Makes me very angry.”[16]
It was one of several books in train that year; the others are listed at the CIA Insider’s Guide omnibus.
See also
Publication status and the ninth book (July 2026)
By mid-2026 Kiriakou described Remains of the Day as his eighth book and open for pre-order, with signed copies going out in February and general release in March — “Barnes & Noble, Target, all over the place, Amazon” — through rarebirdlit.com, and published by Simon & Schuster, an imprint he says he is “very proud of.”[17][18]
He put the follow-up, Whispers in the Dirt — the guide to New York City’s Mafia graves — at about 70% complete, and described a working session on it: thinking about the mid-century Mafia figure Tommy Costello, finding an angle, and writing roughly 600 words in an hour.[19]
See Kiriakou’s writing process for how the books get made.