Customer Reviews

The Grove

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The author's tight writing style makes this psychological thriller very high impact. The Grove is the story of troubled Dex McCray, who finds the body of a young girl on his farm. Dex doesn't report it because he realizes he may have done the murder. He hasn't been taking his medicine and has blackouts. The realistic dialog and straightforward narration creates interesting characters and vivid relationships as Dex tries to solve the crime while spiraling deeper into mental illness. I found the story so captivating that I could not put it down. This is a very satisfying and intense read. If you are looking for a page turner it doesn't get much better than this.

This book is one of those great

-late night-can't put it down til it's done-3am finish-oversleep with nightmares-late to work-think about it all the next day-books....

It caught my interest on the first page, and then I was HOOKED by the end of the first chapter.
Haunting images that stayed with me for days after.....

The textured layers and splinters of relationships, friendships,conflicts,loyalties, even the blossoming relationship with a dead girl drew me further and further in to McCrays world.....

Just when I thought we couldn't go any deeper into McCray's 'breakdown' (if he is even having a breakdown that is)..... the author shows us another staircase headed down, down, down... the pace quickens, the tension builds...

and when it was all over,I am left surprised, shocked, and craving more from this author.

This book was highly touted by Amazon and there were mostly 5 star ratings so I took a chance on it. The book is about the thoughts of a person who is not always "all there." Dexter is a farmer who had been in jail for killing someone several years earlier. He is supposed to take medication to control the times he experiences "blackouts" where he later can't remember what he did.

After one of those blackouts, Dexter goes looking for his missing tractor and finds a dead teenage girl (Jessica) near it. He does not know what happened to her and is not quite sure if he did the deed during his blackout period. Fearing alerting the authorities he decides to investigate what happened to her on his own.

All through the book the spirit of the dead girl seems to "appear" to him, telling him what to do. Anyone who has seen A Beautiful Mind can see where this might be leading. Dexter has to deal with his friend Greg, who is the Sheriff and his estranged wife, while trying to track down information on the girl.

He periodically visits her body and tries futile attempts to prevent scavengers from attacking the body. The book plods along from there and the reader never really cares about Dexter nor the mystery of what actually happened to Jessica. Sometimes her spirit is totally vindictive, telling Dexter to do bad things. This also turns the reader off to her.

The main saving grace of the book is that it is fairly short with a lot of blank pages between chapters and it could be easily read in a couple of sittings.

This was like a good movie and I had a front row seat. The descriptions were vivid. The characters were real. The flow of the story kept me riveted and I didn't want it to end. It had some mystery, some unfortunate events and the story wrapped up nice and neat in the end without any loose ends. For a first time author, he wrote like a long time pro. This book gets 5 stars from me.

This book is very impressive as long as you know the world you are entering when starting it. It is not a story full of plot or a multitude of characters. Instead it happens over a mere couple of days and is told totally through the mind of our main character Dexter McCray. Author John Rector does a very impressive job here by pulling the reader in from page one and then providing a very satisfying read. The story begins with Dexter waking from an alcoholic blackout and his best friend the sheriff stopping by. Seems Dexter took a wild ride in his tractor and his friend wants to help him get it out of a ditch. But Dexter wants to figure out what happened in his latest blackout. Hre investigates and finds a dead girl and automatically thinks he did it. But he wants to investigate further his steps from the night before. He does get some added assistance and advice along the way - from the dead girl herself no less. As Dexter ventures forth we learn a lot about his past but enough is left unexplained to keep things mysterious. We know he has a drinking problem and blacks out often. We know he has a wife who just left the night before for she had finally had too much. We learn the sheriff, Dexter's best friend, puts much time in making sure his troubled friend is ok. Most importantly we find out that Dexter is prescribed a medication that will still his thoughts, silence his crazy imagination and center him. But alas the pills also dull Dexter and this he does not like. He is not taking the pills as the story begins and struggles with them throughout the book. We never find out his true diagnosis or why he is seeing ghosts. Is it mental illness? Does he have a gift?

In the slim 255 pages here author John Rector takes the reader on a journey in the mind and life of Dexter McCray that will have the reader up all night reading. Did he commit the murder? What is his true story? Is he psychotic? Is he a good or bad man? Read and enter the life of Dexter. It's spooky, mysterious and a great read.

WOW. This was one of the most compelling novels that I have read since Charlie Huston's Hank Thompson series. I know...I know...I shouldn't compare it, but I am trying to give you some point of reference. Anyway, I really, really liked Rector's story, "The Grove", because you weren't always sure if the main character, Dexter was insane (truly mad) or if he was the killer he sought. Let me start over....Dexter McCray is a drunk (and soon you even question that) and wakes to find the body of a teenage girl, Jessica in the grove on his property. Scared to notify the officials (one of which is his childhood friend, Greg) and unable to remember the previous night's activities, Dex isn't sure if he is responsible for the girl's death, especially since he has killed before (and doesn't remember that either), so he soon sets on a path to discover the truth no matter the costs. What made this such a compelling read was that within the first few pages, you realize that Dex is slowly showing signs of madness.... not only is he holding conversations with the deceased girl but he is compelled to follow some of her suggestions, all of which culminate in the final few scenes in the book.

Throughout the novel, you learn a lot about Dex and his mental condition which is putting a strain on his relationship with his wife (Liz), who has recently moved in with her mother. With a history of violence (he killed a man that hurt someone he loved, I assumed his wife...only remembering when he woke up in a jail cell covered in blood with a piece of his victim's skull in his pocked), and a dependency on alcohol (since the hit and run death of his daughter an event of which he has never recovered), Dex appears to be unraveling. Compound all of that with the fact that since he has stopped taking his medicine, he seems to be unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

I give this novel a 5 for the slow building story to the beautifully written conclusion. What I liked most about this tale was that everything wasn't what it seemed, and while it was clear that Dex was going mad, you sympathized and understood him. I also liked the fact that Dex's sanity was disintegrating as Jessica was decomposing in the field and before his very eyes. Most importantly, I for one could understand how loss (wife, his baseball hopes and his life) and grief (from losing his only child without the killer being caught) can turn an already fragile person to have a psychotic break. I can't even explain all of the symbolisms or other ironic things mentioned, but definitely get the book and read it. And while there are no real happy endings, you will be satisfied with the conclusion. More importantly, the ending made sense and Rector didn't try to hard to make it a flowery. It was what it was, full of tragedy and irony. What did unfold was a beautifully written novel that left you simply breathless and wondering what the future holds for Dex. I will definitely read another Rector novel in the future.

John Rector's writing style is refreshingly tight and defies genre placement. In his debut novel, the author mixes equal parts of psychological thriller, whodunit, and chiller to create a real page turner of a story.

He brings you into the life of Dexter McCray as he wakes up from a blackout, finds his wife gone, the sheriff making coffee, his tractor driven into a ditch, and a dead girl in his field that the sheriff doesn't know about.

From Dex's point of view, things don't look so good. He's gone off his medication, and he has a history, so he decides to do a little investigating on his own. Dex finds it increasingly difficult to keep it together long enough to figure things out as he plumbs his own depths. The dead girl, Jessica, seems to want to help. But she is also rapidly deteriorating, and in more ways than one.

How this all comes together seems readily apparent, but not all is as it seems.

I sometimes get lost in the story when reading a book, but this book really blurs the line between real and illusion, to the point where you are wondering what is really happening to the main character.
Dexter McCray is a farmer with a dark past that continues to haunt him. He struggles with alcoholism and the falling apart of his marriage after the death of his daughter.
When he remembers to take his pills, life sort of make sense, but he stopped taking them and was coming out of a blackout when he found the dead body of a young woman, unsure if he had killed her himself while he was drunk, he is afraid to report the body to the police.
He feels and thinks that the dead woman is talking to him and asking him to help her, he becomes so involved with keeping his secret and his "romantic" feelings for the dead woman that he is unable to resolve the future of his marriage with his estranged wife.
The story is a mystery, yet also a peek into the mind of a man that has serious emotional problems and the book proved to be a very enjoyable, if somewhat confusing read.

I read this book because I loved The Cold Kiss by this author. In The Grove, he has the same tight style, not a lot of extra words wasted on unnecessary descriptions. He has a very nice style of writing. The story about Dex McCray, his mental illness, delusions and black outs is a very interesting one, although sometimes frustrating. You kind of want to yell at him to stop drinking and take his pills already. But, Rector does a good job describing the gray that life seems to McCray when on his pills and you do understand why he is reluctant to go back on them. The story builds to a suspenseful climax, but resolves in a fairly bland way. I'm not sure what I would want him to do differently - perhaps explore the relationship with his wife a bit more deeply or get to know McCray better as a person aside from his illness. It seems to be lacking some depth there that prevents me from giving it 5 stars. In any case, it is a very interesting, well written book and I enjoyed it very much.

This book was so great that I read it in one day, putting off everything else I needed to get done.

The author did an excellent job of showing the main character's slow descent into madness. I loved it that it was all told from the main character's viewpoint.

There were even times I began to wonder myself if the 'girl' was a ghost who was really talking to him.

Just a terrific read. I can't wait to read more of his books.