Sunday, April 14, 2013

Three Graves Full


"The world was short one human being because of Jason Getty," a lonely widower and "crackerjack wallflower" who, on a moonlit October night, was pushed too far and killed a man who had it coming. Jason may have hidden the body, burying the corpse in his suburban backyard, but he can't live with himself. For seventeen months, he goes through the motions of living his life, most nights "watching through the dining-room window for the unavoidable squad car to turn down the street and ruin his life." 

When landscapers come to do a routine clean-up of Jason's property, they discover not one body, but two, that of a man and a woman, buried in the flower bed in the front of Jason's house. (Uh-oh!) The guilt-ridden nightmare of Jason's life suddenly flares. He is thrust into a harrowing investigation to identify the two corpses--how and why they got there--and he is forced to shed his isolated existence. Will the authorities find the third body?

Jason's destiny becomes intertwined with a jilted woman looking for the missing pieces of her own life, an upstanding small-town detective and his astute police dog and a mysterious loner whose own actions and past may very well dictate the fates of all involved.

In Three Graves Full, Jamie Mason has crafted an off-beat, menacing tale about a criminal with a conscience. Irony and dark humor propel the plot in ways that reinvigorate the crime novel, revealing sharp insights into the complexities of the human heart and mind.

Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason
Gallery Books, $24.99, Hardcover, 9781451685039, 320 pp
Publication Date: February 13, 2013
To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE


Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (2/15/13), click HERE.