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    The Grove
    The Grove
    The Grove
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Grove

    Written by John Rector

    Narrated by Todd Haberkorn

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The last time farmer Dexter McCray went off his medication, someone wound up dead. So, after waking from an alcoholic blackout to discover his tractor stuck in a ditch and the body of a teenage girl in the cottonwood grove bordering his cornfield, things begin to look worryingly familiar.

    With no alibi and a creeping suspicion that he might be to blame for the girl’s death, Dexter decides to investigate the crime himself. He can’t tell anyone. Not his friend, the sheriff, nor his estranged wife, whose love he’s desperate to win back. And certainly not the Tollivers, his redneck neighbors.

    Now, isolated and alone, Dexter turns to the only person he believes he can trust: the dead girl herself.

    In this gritty noir novel, John Rector weaves an intensely sinister tale that pits reality against hallucination, truth against improbability. Is Dexter motivated by guilt or insanity? And what really happened that night in The Grove?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 11, 2012
    ISBN9781469243252
    The Grove
    Author

    John Rector

    John Rector is the bestselling author of the novels The Cold Kiss, The Grove, Already Gone, Out of the Black, and Ruthless. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and has won several awards, including the International Thriller Award for his novella, Lost Things. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

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    Reviews for The Grove

    3.5/5

    54 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Dexter McCray had his life destroyed the day his daughter was killed by a hit and run. His wife has left him and he has problems with hallucinations and black outs. So when he finds a body at the grove on his farmland he begins to wonder....could he have killed her?He tries to find out himself by questioning the town and joining in the search as he knows that if he phones in the body then he would be the one taken away. However as time goes on his paranoia becomes harder to control and manifests in the dead girl appearing before him asn decomposing as time goes by. She tells him what he needs to do to keep the secret and he fights between knowing that what he is doing is wrong and wanting not to break the relationship he has with this hallucination.In the end all of this leads to him shooting the local sheriff when the body is found. But does the sheriff survive? Is Dexter guilty of murder and will the town forgive him and take him back to its heart?A great book and very dark in places. You can imagine the dark path that the character went down and you wonder how he will ever get out from it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Loved this book. It was short and creepy, following a man and his descent into madness. Started it last night, finished it this afternoon.
    • 4/5
      Dexter, wakes up in his bed one morning, fully dressed, to find his friend, the local sheriff, standing over him and any memory of what happened last night gone. The sheriff is there because Dexter's wife called to tell him how angry and out of control Dexter was the night before, one reason she had left to move in with her mom for the time being. The sheriff also tells him that his tractor is gone from it's usual parking place and appears to have been driven into one of the fields, and is now stuck in a ditch.Dexter has no memory of that either. Maybe because he has stopped taking his medication, medication that he has been taking since his stint years ago in the mental institution, and has started heavily drinking instead. Not good decisions, but two of only many, many bad decisions Dexter makes in this book.When he goes out into the field to try and move the tractor, he catches a glimpse of something in the grove of trees that borders his farm. Thinking it is trash from the kids that sometimes hang out there at night, he is shocked to find a body, the dead body, of a young high school girl. At first, he starts to call the police, but then he knows that he will be their first suspect. And in fact, he is not at all sure that he did not kill her, since he can't remember the previous night.So...he decides to investigate what happened himself. Not really smart.But don't worry. He will not have to do it himself.The bad new is that his companion is the dead girl herself, increasing horrible visions of the dead girl, urging him on to more ever more irrational and horrible things.Dexter suffers from some unnamed metal disorder, which sounds a lot like schizophrenia, and is not helped by the fact that he has stopped taking the medication that have kept the voices at bay for years, or by the fact that he is drinking continually for most of the book. A very bad combination.He is a man spiraling out of control. As we find out, something terrible has happen in Dexter's life in the previous year that has set off this decline and now his wife has left him and he is losing his tentative grasp on reality.Could he have killed someone in a drunken, mentally impaired blackout?Well, he has before…To have any sympathy for the narrator, you have to accept that there is, to him, some sort of logic in his endless series of bad, drunken, mad decisions. And I am not sure why, but I did. Maybe the concern of his friend, the sheriff and his wife is enough to convince us that he was once a different man and could be again. I did indeed find something likable and sympathetic about him. Yes, he is doing some very irrational things, all seeming just making the situation worse. But the reader still has some hope that maybe it will all work out, although it seems increasing unlikely. This book is a quick read and one that I found a real page turner. It is well written in a very direct style that suits the slightly bizarre story perfectly. Dark and creepy and disturbing and, luckily, short enough to be read in one long, scary sitting...all alone..in the dark...in the cold wee hours of the night.
    • 4/5
      The most distinctive aspect of this murder mystery is the unreliable narrator, Dexter McCray, a reformed ex-con and psychiatric patient whose life is spiraling back toward madness since the death of his young daughter and decision to stop taking his medication. When Dexter awakens from a drinking binge with no memory of the previous night's events and finds a teenage girl's dead body lying in the field near his house, he fears the absolute worst. Despite the fact that the local sheriff happens to be a childhood friend, the unmedicated Dexter makes a rash decision to solve the murder himself before going to the authorities. And this is just the first in a string of progressively worse decisions, as Dexter's ham-fisted efforts at investigating the murder draw more and more attention to his imbalanced state of mind. Drunk almost the entire novel and haunted by a macabre vision of the dead girl who talks him out of making rational decisions, the Dexter's mad antics ratchet up the suspense to a nearly unbearable level. How many more bad decisions can Dexter make, we wonder, before someone finally suspects he's the murderer? John Rector's spare prose and dark atmosphere work effectively, and the interplay between Dexter's memories of his dead daughter and sympathies toward the murdered girl in his field gives the story some convincing psychological depth. The one thing that kept me from awarding five stars is the lack of believability in some of the later plot points, which allows Dexter to go undetected by his Sheriff friend and wife far longer than seems plausible. But if you can get past this plausibility challenge and are not turned off by some graphic images, you will likely find The Grove to be a unique and compelling mystery.
    • 5/5
      I bought this book because it was inexpensive and I had read a short review on a blog recommending the book. I was hoping for a couple of hours of recreational reading and a feeling that I hadn't wasted a couple of bucks. Well, far from it, this was the best couple of bucks I've spent on an unknown author (at least to me) in a very long time.A man finds a girls body in his corn field. His personal life is in shambles and he should be taking medication but he's not. The girl (the dead one) wants his help. The story then becomes a challenge of determining what's real and what's not.It is a page turner in the classical sense, it's disturbing, but you can't put it down. With every page you, like the protagonist being drawn deeper and deeper into something you probably should avoid. Only, you know you are on a path and you know you are both now doomed to follow this path to it's completion ....cause you can't put it down.It's good ....really good.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely could not put this one down! The story grabs you in the fist few pages. Each step of the way, you are drawn into the the main characters delusional world as it spirals out of control. Awesome book!