Graveyard Fields

June 1, 2021
A Charleston cop-turned-private eye desperate to put the big city behind him buries himself in picturesque Cruso, North Carolina, and finds that crime and danger are just as plentiful in God's country. A disagreement at gunpoint with his brother-in-law, Sgt. Greg Evans of the Charleston PD, has made Davis Reed persona non grata with his landlady and sister, Laura, whose husband he left in a coma, and made him yearn for an unspoiled place where he can roost undisturbed and write a book about the 1946 crash of a B-25 airplane into the side of Cold Mountain. He rents a cabin from Haywood County Sheriff's Deputy Dale Johnson, who shares his taste in home-brew and heavy metal, but he's still plagued by his need for Xanax chased by beer and his anger-management issues. When Reed finds a set of keys along a mountain trail, he's determined to restore them to their owner, who seems to be remarkably reluctant to claim them. While he's waiting, he befriends mechanic Floppy Johnson, whose grandfather claimed to have found a chest of gold near the crash site. He strikes up a possible romance with improbably named bar owner Diana Ross. And he gets on the wrong side of both Deputy Skeeter Norris and his boss, Sheriff Royce Byrd. First-timer Tingle deftly evokes both a very particular sense of place and his hero's irritated inability to finish anything he starts, though Reed's limitations as a sleuth--his habit of trusting all the wrong people gives a new dimension to Dale's question, "You don't get around to much, do ya?"--make him a better companion than leader. A beer- and pill-soaked idyll whose hero seems equally unlikely to succeed as a novelist or a detective.

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August 1, 2021

DEBUT Davis Reed, inept cop-turned-inept private investigator, fights with his cop brother-in-law and gets shot in the leg, then heads to Cruso, NC, where he rents a cabin from Deputy Dale Johnson, a mountain of a man who shares Davis's passion for home-brewed beer and 1980s heavy metal. Davis aspires to write a nonfiction account of the B-25 bomber that crashed into Cold Mountain in 1946, but his plans die as he's mired in alcohol and Xanax addictions. When he finds a ring of keys on a forest trail, Davis finds a new obsession and soon draws attention from a brewery owner and other untrustworthy characters. Deputy Johnson's cousin Floppy Johnson, a mechanic with a mouth that rattles on, mentions the town's rumors of buried gold; the keys disappear and reappear, and Davis's problems worsen. He hasn't even faced the repercussions from the family fight. Soon he and the Johnson cousins are comically contending with drug dealers, treasure hunters, and corrupt cops. VERDICT The unconventional heroes of this debut are exaggerated, awkward characters in a story that progresses from tragedy to dark humor. Fans of irreverent crime novels with flawed protagonists will appreciate it.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

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