GRAVEYARD FIELDS

A Charleston cop–turned–private eye desperate to put the big city behind him buries himself in picturesque Cruso, North Carolina, and finds that crime and danger are just as plentiful in God’s country.

A disagreement at gunpoint with his brother-in-law, Sgt. Greg Evans of the Charleston PD, has made Davis Reed persona non grata with his landlady and sister, Laura, whose husband he left in a coma, and made him yearn for an unspoiled place where he can roost undisturbed and write a book about the 1946 crash of a B-25 airplane into the side of Cold Mountain. He rents a cabin from Haywood County Sheriff’s Deputy Dale Johnson, who shares his taste in home-brew and heavy metal, but he’s still plagued by his need for Xanax chased by beer and his anger-management issues. When Reed finds a set of keys along a mountain trail, he’s determined to restore them to their owner, who seems to be remarkably reluctant to claim them. While he’s waiting, he befriends mechanic Floppy Johnson, whose grandfather claimed to have found a chest of gold near the crash site. He strikes up a possible romance with improbably named bar owner Diana Ross. And he gets on the wrong side of both Deputy Skeeter Norris and his boss, Sheriff Royce Byrd. First-timer Tingle deftly evokes both a very particular sense of place and his hero’s irritated inability to finish anything he starts, though Reed’s limitations as a sleuth—his habit of trusting all the wrong people gives a new dimension to Dale’s question, “You don’t get around to much, do ya?”—make him a better companion than leader.

A beer- and pill-soaked idyll whose hero seems equally unlikely to succeed as a novelist or a detective.