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If home is where the heart is, Jason had lived in his throat for a long time. As such, not a lot of maintenance had been requires beyond crunching antacids to cool the pipes.
Getting Advance Reader Copies on a regular basis is a sign that you made it as a book blogger. It's quite the experience, though. I've came to build a relationship with several small presses, they came to understand what I like and wouldn't bother sending me anything that would make me want to stab myself in the eye with a pen. It's a different relationship with the Big Six. You deal with employees who have certain book to promote, so the result isn't always pretty and yet it's nobody's fault, really. THREE GRAVES FULL, by Jamie Mason might be the first glaring success of my Big Six relationship as an ARC reviewer. It's a good novel. It's not a great novel, but the sheer talent of Jamie Mason is enough of an upside for me to be thrilled about reading it.
The blurbs that compared it to the Coen brothers' movies didn't lie, at least for certain parts. The main protagonist Jason Getty has killed a man, a little over a year ago and lives with him buried in his backyard. Badly so, I might add. His guilt eating away at him, he lets his backyard go awry and that raises Jason's paranoia. What if the neighbors start getting suspicious of the man with the miniature jungle backyard? When he decides to hire a landscaping crew, the quickly dig up a body. Not the body of the man Jason had buried. That freaks him out immensely. As the title indicates, there are three graves full in Jason Getty's backyard and this particular kind of dead come with a lot of baggage. Families that sorely misses them, for starters!
Thing about THREE GRAVES FULL is that it's brilliant, superb, it makes you more alive...up to page 80, more or less. It's where-were-you-all-my-life good. That's both uplifting and a problem at the same time. Because there comes a point around chapter eight or nine where most of what Jamie Mason carefully set up is actually resolved. So there are still 220 pages of a different kind of novel. The plot follows what it already established, but the structure undergoes a radical change. The slow, creeping atmosphere-heavy mystery I loved to much slowly falls apart and reveals a more linear, predictable and overblown chase storyline that's more confusing that it is funny.
Jason had named himself a coward many times and sometimes even fairly. He'd lost count of his regrets, but kept a running tally of all that his yellow streak had cost him over the years.
It's still a quite fun ride through THREE GRAVES FULL. Why do I say that if I just condemned the execution of its dual nature? Well, Jamie Mason writes really well. It's a fun prose to read and if you're writing too, it will make you want to raise your game. There are little overwriting hiccups along the road (i.e. I don't think you can describe a car as "nimble") but I'm being nit-picky here. Even in its flaws, THREE GRAVES FULL has something endearing about it. For example, Mason's excessive use of "hooks" a catch phrase that embodies what happens in the chapter, but has nothing to do with the action. If you've written before, you know these are of a tremendous help to get you started. As a reader, I like them at the very beginning of a novel, but they get overbearing if used too often. But it's cool. It's a petty offense considering THREE GRAVES FULL is a first novel.
Literature, unlike music, is a medium where the first offering rarely is the best. Writers get better with practice and more graceful with their storytelling once they got certain stories out of their system. THREE GRAVES FULL is no APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION, but it's an interesting promise for whatever lies down the line for Jamie Mason. She's a bright, new talent in crime fiction and deserves your attention for she can write uplifting material. I'm just not in love with THREE GRAVES FULL is particular, but I have no doubt whatsoever that her future novel will be more seamless and subtle. Keep her in mind and give THREE GRAVES FULL a try if you're feeling limber. Oh and what the hell. It's Friday, so let's treat ourselves to another Guns N' Roses classic.
THREE STARS