Ray Moon
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.
Claudete Takahashi
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.