When product designer Greg Holdsworth discovered his timber-loving father-in-law buried in a coffin of plastic handles and printed fake woodgrain, his reaction was less grief than affront — an inauthentic object, a final dishonesty dressed up as respect.

Leave No Trace is the story of what he did about it, and of the decade it cost him.

Part entrepreneurial memoir, part environmental exposé, part meditation on mortality, it follows a single stubborn idea — an honest coffin — as it grows into a company, a cause, and a vehicle for change.

Holdsworth is candid and funny about a funeral trade barely changed since the Victorians: exploding caskets, mercury-laden fillings, and the unlikely path from an unknown New Zealand design project to recognition at the Smithsonian.

Beneath it runs a serious claim: that good design answers not just how a thing looks, but the social, environmental, and emotional problems it can quietly solve. When the values he'd fought for begin to slip away, he walks — a dark cloud with a silver lining of reflection and creativity.

For readers of Mary Roach's Stiff or Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — a book about death, design, and doing things properly, told with heart and a straight face only some of the time.