Shallow Graves

Compelling thriller of small town darkness. Jeffery Deaver is a must buy, must read author. This easy to follow storyline is filled with twists that keep the reader enthralled.

Believable characters with distinct personalities. Dialogue is entertaining and informative. Great ideas throughout that can be used as quotes.

“We left it up in the air. It’s tough to make movies based on true stories. You have to pamper reality.”

"Ambler was a religious man (on the executive committee of the First Presbyterian Church), and although he understood that Calvinistic predestination did not absolve him from choosing the right path, the moral path, nonetheless the religion instilled in him a tendency toward helplessness on those moral questions the answers to which he did not like. He tended to throw his hands up and follow his instinct.

So although he knew what he was doing was immoral, he felt an addiction to his mistress, and could more or less successfully conclude that he had no control over the matter."

Factories generally depressed Pellam—the regimentation, the way machines dictated where people stood and what they did (reflecting some kind of fear, he decided, that if it all fell apart, he’d end up on an assembly line somewhere twisting sheet metal screws into Whirlpools for the rest of his life).

"I keep looking for answers in the past. If I’m not careful, there won’t be any future left."

“I heard this line once: a relationship’s like a fire. You got a few months of flame, a year of embers, then the rest smoke.” Reynolds Price

I will re-read this story and look forward to other works by this author.

A movie location scout does exactly what the name suggests -- finds locations for location shooting of a movie. You might think this would be a fairly safe job. After all, it's a matter of working through a list of desired locations and reaching agreements with the owners to use those locations and with local officials to impose on the town for a while. But here there are problems: his partner is shot, everybody believes it was an accident, our hero gets fired but stays around, and then things /really/ get exciting. And dangerous. And deadly. With a surprise at the end.

I am an avid fan of Deaver's more recent Lincoln Rhymes books, and have gone back to read many of his earlier works. This book is very entertaining, with complicated plot twists, but I can't give it five stars because it lacks the incredible technical forensic details of the later Rhymes books. This is the first of the "Location Scout" books which Deaver wrote under a pen name. The lead character, John Pellam, is a Hollywood location scout who is checking out locations with his partner in a small upstate New York town. Pellam is fired after the death of his partner derails the film's shooting schedule. Rather than retreat to Hollywood with his sorrow and tail between his legs, Pellam stays where he is to prove that his friend was murdered, and not the victim of a drug-related accident. He meets a number of local denizens, some welcoming, and others not, in this curious village. The plot is quite complex, and full of last minute twists. This was a good, quick murder-mystery-suspense story. I look forward to reading the rest of the series as they are re-released.