The Grove by John Rector is a sinister tale of death and mental instability. I had no expectations going in, and found it to be a grim but solid read. The dark premise has a farmer with a history of mental illness finding the body of a young girl on his property, in a grove beside his cornfields.
Dexter McCray is an alcoholic who agrees his estranged wife should stay away for a while. After driving his tractor into a ditch, he awakens from a blackout to discover the girl facedown under a pile of crows. He thinks he's innocent, but can't be sure. His solution is to leave her there and not report it. An odd situation, growing stranger when she appears behind him, looking young and fresh, and starts to talk to him. She doesn't say how she died, and he doesn't ask, he just helps her by cleaning up her body as it begins to decay. Going into town, he asks around the diner she worked at, and directed by their conversations, talks to her friends for clues about her life and how she may have ended up dead. Was it murder?
As time passes, both the girl who appears to him wherever he goes and her physical body deteriorate. The danger someone will discover her becomes real when his creepy neighbour begins to ask questions, along with his friend the town Sheriff. Something will have to be done or they will discover her. Reality or hallucination, his constant drinking keeps him from continuing with his antipsychotic medication, one step away from a mental breakdown.
John Rector is the author of The Cold Kiss, which has been optioned for a film, and to me this read more like a novelized screen treatment than a developed mystery. It's an odd sort of crime novel, a dark ride full of bad decisions, but it's well written and engaging for the short time it took to read it. Certainly not bad, but not very memorable.
2011 / Tradeback / 248 pages
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