Customer Reviews

Cemetery Road

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4 star:		(1)
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The long awaited return of one of crime fiction's top storytellers is worth the wait. Gar Anthony Haywood is one of the very best crime writers working. His Aaron Gunner series is a classic and his latest work CEMETERY ROAD is as good as anything he's written. The characters are authentic, the story is tight, and Haywood's voice is there throughout, which is a welcomed sound in today's weak crime fiction market. The story builds like a freight train leaving the station, growing more powerful and moving faster with each chapter, until the climactic end that hits with full force.

I highly recommend this book, and if you haven't read Haywood's earlier work, pick them up as well. You won't be disappointed.

Buy this book. Gar Haywood, one of the best writers in the mystery/thriller genre, is back with his finest novel yet. It's already been nominated for a few awards, and it will be nominated for a bunch more, and will almost certainly win some of them. CEMETERY ROAD is one of the five or six best books I've read in the past year, a nuanced, deeply felt meditation on getting older, on trying to outlive the reverberations of the past, on dealing with the consequences of our deeds and misdeeds, and on the nature of friendship. And it also grabs the reader by the back of the neck and practically pushes his or her face into the page. When Errol "Handy" White comes back to Los Angeles for the first time in more than 25 years, it's to attend the funeral of RJ Burrow, one of the closest friends of his youth, someone who joined with Errol and another friend, O'Neal Holden, in an act of revenge that had disastrous unforeseen consequences. The aftermath of that act has shaped Errol's life ever since, but the ghosts it created have not been laid to rest. Errol's inquiry into how RJ really died brings all of them barging into the present, seeking the resolution Errol both needs and dreads.

Great story, great characters, great setting, prose that just seems to burn itself into the page. Just buy the damn thing and see for yourself.

Errol "Handy" White has a terrible secret. It is one he and his two friends have kept for twenty six years, one resulting from a robbery gone bad. A secret so terrible, the three young men agree to never see each other again for fear of being found out. To ensure this pact, Handy sets off to start a new life in Minnesota, leaving Los Angeles - along with R.J. Burrows and O'Neal Holden - behind for good...

...until R.J.'s body is found riddled with bullets in the trunk of a car twenty six years later. Far more than the desire to pay his respects, Handy flies back to LA to try and discover whether R.J.'s murder has anything to do with their secret... and if Handy is next in line to fall. O'Neal, long since the mayor of Bellwood, does not share Handy's concerns, believing instead the evidence pointing to a drug deal gone bad. Nothing would make Handy happier than to agree, but the clues he keeps uncovering while in LA prevent him from doing so. That, and the fact that while in town, he is followed, beaten up and icily dismissed in response to his questions for those who seem to know more than they will admit. Even though the physical evidence found at the murder scene points towards only one alleged killer, Handy refuses to believe the case is that cut and dry. Paranoid or not, the list of possible suspects in his mind goes far beyond just one. And he has no desire to do nothing in case his paranoia turns out to be justified.

On every level, this book hits the mark. Gar Anthony Haywood does a superb job in his presentation of Cemetery Road, maintaining the reader's high interest throughout as he takes us back and forth between the present and the past. Filling in two puzzles piece by piece - who killed R.J., and what was the terrible secret from so many years ago that might have led to his murder - with both puzzles completed and colliding at the climactic ending.

The story is told in first person, and Haywood is a master at giving the readers an intimate look inside the protagonist's mind, allowing them to feel Handy's conflict, his guilt, and his intense fear about possibly having to pay for a sin he committed twenty six years earlier. Quite possibly pay with his life. Haywood makes Handy human to readers, makes him relatable. As a result, readers find themselves fully invested in his outcome, eager to discover his fate at the end. But at the same time, finding their stomachs tighten a bit as the terrible secret is about to be revealed, wary of how their opinion of Handy, a positive one throughout, may change once his secret is revealed. But too invested in the answer to close the book before finding out.

Additionally, Haywood's descriptive style is definitive and illuminating, giving readers a clear picture of the characters and the poor Los Angeles neighborhood in which Handy and his buddies grew up, allowing readers to easily imagine those distinct areas of southern California as Handy makes his way through them. And the characters' dialogue is authentic, believable. Nothing stiff or false rings through their words, their conversations, their slang, even their thoughts.

At 216 pages, CEMETERY ROAD can be polished off in one weekend. And should be... absolutely.

Handy White is good at fixing things. Close to fifty, he owns a repair shop in St. Paul, Minnesota. His specialty: bringing obsolete junk back to life. But as far as his own life goes, he left it behind in LA thirty years ago.

Handy and his two best friends did something terrible way back when. Now one of them has been murdered. Are the other two next? Is the past catching up with them? When Handy returns to LA for his friend's funeral, he decides to find the killer, and determine exactly what's going on.

Gar Anthony Haywood's portrayal of the three friends is vivid. We get to know them well as young black men, "brash, foolish and drunk with the power of youth." And we see them as middle aged men, each dealing very differently with guilt. Although Handy turns out to be a pretty good investigator, he goes in wrong directions, and violence breaks out all around him. Nothing turns out as you might expect.

The narration switches between past and present, sometimes breaking off at a horribly tense moment. I suffered agonies right along with the characters. But Haywood is an accomplished writer and pulled me through. As a prose stylist Haywood is both elegant and gritty, witty and compassionate.

This is the third Gar Haywood book I've read. The story was very good and was delivered by alternating between two time frames. It was complex enough to be interesting, but not so much that it was hard to follow. The story doesn't come completely into focus until the very end. The urban Los Angeles setting was a bonus since I grew up there. The best I've read from Gar and my favorite book of this type in several years.

Cemetery Road was a wonderful surprise. Another author could have turned the story into a cliched urban noir but instead Haywood unfolds a battle of one man's morality and his struggle to reconcile his life's choices. The action is there when it needs to be and the back story unfolds in a perfectly paced slow burn to keep you reading on and on. The conclusion, the whole resolution - not just the last chapter - was as gut wrenching as anything since Gone Baby Gone.
This one will sneak up on you and stick with you for a long time.

One of the central themes of noir film and literature is that the past is inescapable, and that's certainly the dominant theme in this long-awaited novel from an acclaimed, but not widely known, writer. The story is narrated by Handy, the sensible one in a trio of three high school friends who lived a life of petty crime back in late '70s Los Angeles. Spurred by an incident involving a girl and some drugs, they decide to step up their game and rip off a local drug dealer. Bad things happen (although what exactly that was isn't laid out until well into the book), and three friends agree to split up and never meet again.

Twenty-five years later, one of the friends is found shot to death in a car, a murder which reunites Handy with the third friend and reopens that closed door to the past. As Handy pokes around a little, looking into the murder, it spurs a reassessment of the trio's friendship and the dark events that led to his moving to Minnesota those decades ago. The chapters alternate between the past and present, slowly revealing what went down years ago, and how it might or might not relate to the present. Handy is a sad middle-aged man with nothing to show for his life other than some deft mechanical repair skills and an estranged daughter. In attempting to solve his old friend's murder, he's also trying to bring some kind of closure to the past that's haunted him for so long.

The story has plenty of twists, turns, and startling revelations, but at the same time, isn't particularly memorable. What I really took away from the book is a keen sense of the weight Handy carries with him, and the sense of melancholy revisiting the past can bring. Oddly enough, what it reminded me most of is the Dennis Lehane book Mystic River, and like that book, I could see it making a good film.

Handy is a brilliantly conceived character with a broken heart that aches with humanity. The crime from their past is genuinely horrific and the reader feels the burden that Handy carries with him when the fullness of it is revealed.

Cemetery Road is a contender for one of the best books I've read this year.

In 1979 Los Angeles, three young black men, best friends since high school - Errol ["Handy"] White, O'Neal ["O' "] Holden, and R.J. ["RJ"] Burrow - self-described as petty thieves, decide to make a bold move, something that will bring them a high score at low risk. But the proverbial best-laid plans go unbelievably awry, in the aftermath of which they make a pact to rid themselves of the stolen goods [money and drugs] and to never contact each other again, each aspect of which a difficult decision. But since the original owner of the goods is a feared drug dealer, they agree it must be done. Handy fled to St. Paul, Minnesota; O'Neal is now the mayor of Bellwood, just outside of LA; and RJ has been murdered - shot four times and left in the trunk of a stolen car. Handy and O'Neal meet for the first time in 25 years at RJ's funeral, although Handy returns to Minnesota later that same day.

The tale is told from the p.o.v.of Handy, who describes O'Neal as one "born to be a mover and a shaker, a force of nature wrapped tightly if precariously in human form;" RJ as "not nearly so complex. If any of us was predisposed to a life of crime, it was him. R.J. was short and lean and forever on the lookout for any sign of disrespect, and there was no fight or challenge he would not take on with the zeal of a man possessed;" and himself as "a sad-eyed, middle-aged black man with a salt-and-pepper beard . . . who'd never married but had a grown daughter he rarely saw and barely knew, turning screws on broken toasters and washing machines just to eat."

One week later, Handy returns to LA: "I'd come back to Los Angeles following R.J.'s funeral in pursuit of a pipe dream, the preposterous belief that I could involve myself in the fallout from my old friend's murder just enough to keep the past in the past. But it couldn't be done. I could see that now. Wheels had been set in motion that would eventually, inexorably bring what R.J., O' and I had done twenty-six years ago to light, and I no longer had the hubris nor the energy to fight it."

The title of the book derives from something Handy was told many years ago by his grandfather: "there were many paths a man could take during his time on earth, but sooner or later, they all brought him down the same one: cemetery road. There was no running from it, there was no hiding from it."

The writing put this reader in mind of Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins books. But ultimately that is unfair to Mr. Haywood. This is a wholly original and powerful book, with the answers not revealed till the final pages, and is recommended.

Competent writing is what carries the reader to the end of the book. Plot and character development do not rate as stellar, so don't believe the reviews on the back cover. However, if you like murder mysteries, this is better than most of the stuff on the library shelves