In Three Graves Full, Jamie Mason has crafted an offbeat, menacing tale that is beautifully written and compulsively readable. 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.
"The world was short one human being because of Jason Getty," a lonely young 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 Stillwater backyard, but he can't live with himself. For 17 months, he goes through the motions of living, most nights "watching through the dining-room window for the unavoidable squad car to turn down the street and ruin his life." But when landscapers come to do a routine clean-up of Jason's property, they discover not one body, but two--another man and a woman--in the flower bed out front. 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 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. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines