Graveyard Fields: A Novel

· Crooked Lane Books
4.0
4 reviews
Ebook
288
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

Filled with humor and twists, Tingle's debut is a slow burn mystery that could only take place in the South, for fans of Timothy Hallinan and Janet Evanovich.

Private detective Davis Reed didn’t move to Cruso, North Carolina looking for friends. Down on his luck, Davis narrowly escaped an anonymous attempt on his life and fled to the tiny mountain community in order to hide, brew his own beer, and put his detective days behind him to work on a non-fiction book. But as usual with Davis, things aren’t going to plan.

When he finds several keys on a mountain trail near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Davis sets out to locate the rightful owner. Upon discovering that one of the keys fits a vintage BMW owned by a man who’s recently vanished, Davis can’t help but think the keys unlock a mystery, or better yet, a chest full of gold rumored to be hidden somewhere among the mountains of western North Carolina.

But keys that could lead to lost gold are a hot commodity, and Davis needs to outsmart everyone from law enforcement officials to amateur treasure hunters who are willing to do anything to get their hands on them. To make matters worse, people from Davis’s past are catching up to him.

Along with his new best friend, Dale Johnson, a local deputy who knows just how to push Davis’s buttons, and Dale’s cousin Floppy, a mad genius mechanic armed with a heart of gold and a mouth that never stops moving, Davis tries desperately to find lost treasure, start a romance with a smooth talking brewery owner, and most importantly, stay alive.

Ratings and reviews

4.0
4 reviews
Ray Moon
August 27, 2021
Graveyard Fields Appeared Interesting; It Wasn’t The novel opens with Davis Reed following his sister’s husband, Greg, who is a sergeant in the Charleston Police Department. Greg uses police calls for leaving home at various hours, but the wife thinks that he is having an affair. As Davis is a private detective, she asks him to follow him to confirm her suspensions. Greg drives past his police station and continues on to a 24-hour storage complex. Davis watches until he leaves and sneaks in. After Greg and another person in an Audi leave, he approaches the garage door. He guesses at the combination and opens the garage. Inside he finds bags of marijuana, pills, cash and a Glock. Then, Greg returns. After a heated discussion, a fight ensues. Davis achieves the upper hand, but then the he’s blinded by the headlights of another car. That person shoots him in the leg and he falls asleep. A new chapter starts sometime later with Davis waking in a remote cabin in southwest North Carolina near Cold Mountain. The author took quite a few pages to explain how Davis went from being shot to being in the isolated cabin almost 300 miles from Charleston. During this time, the foundation of the other main storyline thread really starts here. While Davis was hiking, he discovers a key ring full of keys off the trail. The novel proceeds from here. The main storyline was very disjointed and spent an inordinate time on homebrewed beer. All the major characters seem to homebrew beer. If they don’t, they prefer drinking homebrewed beer, and the local drinking establishment serves its own homebrewed beer. The are long discussions on homebrewing beer. Back to the storyline, Davis rents the cabin from a local North Carolina Deputy Sheriff who when presented with odd circumstances surrounding the keys dismisses foul play out of hand, even in the mounting events surrounding the keys. This character just did not seem realistic to me. For the second main story thread for why he is there and the events back in Charleston, raised several red flags. Something was just not right, and I felt Davis should have seen this earlier. As the novel was approaching the conclusion, there were some twists and turns some of which were quite good. Unfortunately, for me it was too little and too late. For the B-storyline, if you remove all the discussion and drinking of homebrewed beer, there wasn’t much substance in the B-storyline threads. I felt the only character that was the best defined was the Sheriff. For me, the B-storylines were very thin. If foul language is objectionable for you, this book will be a problem. The Deputy Sheriff can’t seem to string two sentences together without a vulgar word or two. I’m retired Navy having served on three ships. I am quite tolerant of this language, but even for me, it was excessive. After reading the teaser on NetGalley, this novel sounded interesting. I requested it. If it wasn’t for a promise that I made in my NetGalley biography that if I receive a book, I will read it completely, I probably would have stopped early. While there were glimpses of potential by this author, I will not be reading any of this author’s books at least for a while. I rate this novel with two stars. I received a free e-book version of this novel through NetGalley from Crooked Lane Books with an expectation for an honest, unbiased review. I wish to thank Crooked Lane Books for the opportunity to read and review their novels early.
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Tonja Spencer
September 5, 2021
I loves this. It made me laugh. For a first time experience with this author he kept the language and times fresh. It's fiction so I expect to be drawn in to a story and taken to the places the characters go and I was able to do just that. I would definitely read more by this author.
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Claudete Takahashi
August 4, 2022
Graveyard Fields is a very good start to a new series. The characters are well developed and the main one in this story is an ex-cop, who uses drugs and drinks too much. He is the antithesis of a hero, but that's the role he is granted in the story, which is fast-paced, dark humored, and with flawed characters that grab your attention and even make you laugh. A very enjoyable read! I downloaded a free copy of this book through NetGalley and this is my unbiased opinion.
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About the author

Steven Tingle was born and raised in western North Carolina. Before becoming a writer he was a golf resort manager, real estate developer, and restauranteur. As a journalist specializing in travel, style, and food and drink his work has appeared in Robb Report, Modern Luxury, Town, Tempus, and Discovery. He lives in upstate South Carolina with his wife Jess.

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