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AN UNQUIET GRAVE
by P. J. Parrish
Pinnacle, February 2006
429 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0786016078


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

It's Thanksgiving in 1988, but instead of 29-year-old PI Louis Kincaid spending the holiday peacefully with his friend from Miami, he has come back to Michigan to help his foster father with a problem.

Kincaid had been passed from hand to hand in the system until finally Phillip and Fran Lawrence took him in. Despite the fact that Louis was black and the Lawrences were white, they treated him as if he were their true son, even sending him to college. So Kincaid feels he owes them.

When he gets to Michigan, he finds that the problem is more severe than he thought. Fran was not Phillip's first love. That honor went to a young woman from a wealthy family. They were going to elope, but her family found out and prevented it. Phillip was young at the time, so he also finally accepted that he would never be able to marry Claudia DeFoe. He met and married Frances and now they have been married for 31 years. For 16 of those years, Phillip has been tending Claudia's grave without telling Fran.

Claudia's family had put her in a mental asylum. The buildings are to be razed and condos placed on the site, which is near a river. The graves are to be emptied and those family members who wish to, will be allowed to claim and move the bodies of their loved ones. The DeFoes want nothing to do with Claudia, so Phillip claims the body. When her coffin is dug up, it contains nothing but rocks. Phillips asks Louis to find his first love so he can bury her.

What follows is a story as harrowing as a combination of the movies THE SNAKE PIT (1948) and BEDLAM (1946). Louis traces the records of the sanatorium and discovers that the treatment of those declared insane during the 1950s was as primitive and gruesome as during the earlier periods described in the aforementioned films. This is a series, set in the near past, that just grows with every title.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, November 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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