Whether your view is that Halloween is two days behind us or only three hundred sixty-three days away, John Rector has an option for you.  A scant four months ago he brought relief to the summer heat with his icy thriller, The Cold Kiss and now for the late autumnal chill he offers The Grove, a quiet and disquieting, post-spooky, creep fest.

Something is bothering Dexter McCray. He may just be missing his wife who’s recently left him, it may be that he’s off his meds, drinking again and his blackouts are back, but then maybe that’s why his wife left him. But what’s really throwing him off is the dead girl he found in the cottonwood grove  on the other side of his cornfield. He’s got questions to answer before he can alert the police to her presence: first off, who is she? How did she get there? And most importantly, did he kill her? If he lets it out that there’s a dead girl on his property, and that he can’t account for his actions the night before, well that’s all the police’ll need. After all, he killed a man once before during a blackout. Everybody knows that.

Dexter takes it upon himself to solve the killing, beginning to investigate before anyone in town even realizes she’s missing. When he's not haunting the diner where she worked, he's spending most of his time sitting in the grove with the specter of the mysterious girl where he begins carrying on conversations with her at length, giving rise to a new set of questions: is it her ghost he’s speaking to? Is she an alcoholic hallucination or a side effect of dropping his medication?

With a remarkably sure hand, Rector balances the complexities of the story, never letting it go into the ditches that material like this can drift toward, (ghost scares, chemical dependency cautionary tale, red-herring mysteryville), instead investing us in his characters. We're cautiously interested in Dexter's marriage and past, we believe in his empathy for the dead girl's friends and family even though he can't express it. Rector keeps all the plates spinning without our ever noticing him work, and that’s a feat. More impressive perhaps is the tension sustained throughout as to Dexter’s culpability and the fact that we go along with him as willingly as we do, hoping against hope right alongside him, that he is not responsible for her death. As with Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, that question keeps us at arm’s length from our protagonist for a good portion of the book, but the simple, crisp prose keep us turning pages despite misgivings we may have about our destination.

With the one-two combination of The Cold Kiss and The Grove, Rector has made an audacious entrance to the stage and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

And this cat’s from Omaha, as in Nebraska. He and Sean Doolittle hold forth as the only, (but awesome), examples of the Omaha crime scene that I’m familiar with. I’m guessing there’s some kind of super writing vitamins in the water, (or corn), and I’m ready to try the next Omaha writer I come across based on that alone.

Any recommendations?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.