Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "An Unquiet Grave"

An Unquiet Grave is P.J. Parrish's latest "Louis Kincaid" mystery.

P.J. Parrish is actually the nom de plume of the sisters Kristy Montee and Kelly Montee. I invited them to put the novel to the "page 69 test."

Kris wrote back with the results, introducing her findings with an excerpt from the page:

As Charlie Oberon staggered closer into the light, everything came into focus. His bloody sweatshirt. A woman’s lifeless, naked body. Charlie’s long fingers pressed into her thighs. Arms hanging limp, shreds of dark wet leaves stuck to them. Her hair...long, blond and thick with blood.

“She won’t wake up,” Charlie cried. “She won’t wake up.”

Louis broke into a run toward him.

You know the bromide about putting a body in the first chapter? This is the first dead body in our book and it comes at the end of chapter eight.

I remember when we were writing this book, Kelly and I were concerned about its slow opening. See, our books are tagged “thrillers” so there’s this pressure to grab the reader by the throat early. And in the earlier books of our Louis Kincaid series, we had someone dead by chapter two, often in a sort of “Six Feet Under” prologue.

But then came this story. And we knew the voice telling it had to be more measured. So to talk about page 69, I have to back up to page 1. The story opens with a gentle image: Louis looking at white Christmas lights on the palm tree in the yard of his Florida home:

A stiff breeze was blowing in from the gulf, moving the fronds and sending the lights bobbing and dancing like fireflies on a hot summer night.

Fireflies. July Fourth. Michigan.

But there were no fireflies here. It was November, not July and he was in South Florida.

His mind was playing tricks on him.

Not exactly pulse-pounding, right? But in that one quiet image and especially that last line is the theme of the whole book.

Here’s the setup: Louis gets a call from his foster father Phillip asking him to come home to Michigan. Phillip has been tending a friend’s grave at an abandoned insane asylum for 15 years and the cemetery is being moved to make way for condos. But when the casket is dug up, it is filled with rocks. Phillip asks Louis to find out what happened.

What follows is a deeply personal story about families and abiding love, and the havoc secrets can wreak on both. It is also about the thin line between sanity and madness.

Yes, there is crime, death, the grisly exhumation of a notorious serial killer’s grave, and a terrifying chase through the dark tunnels beneath the asylum grounds.

As for page 69: Things have been quiet for Louis up until this point. But now, when Charlie Oberon, a retarded man who is the asylum’s last remaining patient, stumbles out of the woods cradling the body of a dead nurse, the roller coaster has crested the first hill. The reader, primed by the slow build, is ready for the white-knuckle ride that follows.

Sometimes slower is faster, even in thrillers. And sometimes you have to trust that readers will know that.

Thanks to Kris for the input.

Read an excerpt from An Unquiet Grave.

Among the praise for the novel:

"Bestseller Parrish's gripping and atmospheric new Louis Kincaid novel is a quality read that will remind many of Dennis Lehane. Parrish manages to make would could be a formulaic plot fresh, both through her gift at creating sympathetic main and secondary characters and through her skill creating suspense and sustaining a mood. The author's ability to raise goose bumps puts her in the front rank of thriller writers."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An Unquiet Grave is a wonderfully tense and atmospheric novel. The seventh novel featuring Louis Kincaid keeps the reading guessing until the end."
--Miami Herald

"An Unquiet Grave is a standout thriller. It is an intriguing and atmospheric story set largely on the grounds of an abandoned insane asylum, a haunting location that contains many dark and barbarous secrets. With fresh characters and plot, An Unquiet Grave, is suspense novel of the highest order.
--Chicago Sun-Times