DIG YOUR GRAVE A Gus Parker and Alex Mills Novel

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Fiction
And I picked the place myself

DIG YOUR GRAVE

A Gus Parker and Alex Mills Novel

By Steven Cooper

368 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Mystery writer Steven Cooper returns with the second novel in his new mystery series featuring an unlikely pair of sleuths, and it’s even better than the first entry, Desert Remains, which is also reviewed on this site.

Whenever Phoenix homicide detective Alex Mills is tasked with investigating a bizarre and brutal murder, he turns to his close friend, eccentric psychic Gus Parker, for help – something the police department likes to keep on the down low in these cynical times.

Gus is not your typical psychic, as “some people regard him as an aging hippie himself, what with his long raffish hair, the beaded bracelets, the occasional Yoga class, and of course, the psychic visions.” His psychic powers began manifesting when he was a teenager; his visions are unpredictable, varying from clairvoyance to precognition.

He never knows when a vision will come or what it will entail, and he can’t stop the visions from coming. When he’s not helping his good friend Alex Mills solve murders, he works as a medical imaging technician, performs psychic readings for select clients, and helps another good friend, fellow psychic Beatrice Vossenheimer, publicly expose phony psychics for the charlatans they are.

As Dig Your Grave opens, detective Alex Mills is called to the scene of another bizarre murder. The victim was found in, of all places, a cemetery, buried in a shallow grave adorned by a cardboard marker, a snarky epitaph written on it with a Sharpie:

I’m sorry

That I fucked over everybody

I got what I deserved

And I picked the place myself

The victim’s skull was bashed in. He has no wallet or other identification on him, but based on the way he’s dressed, Alex suspects that he’s one of the wealthy elite. He’s later identified as Davis Klink, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company called Illumilife. A ruthless corporate executive, Klink had numerous enemies.

Meanwhile, though they’ve only been together a year, Gus Parker has moved in with his girlfriend Billie Welch, a legendary rock singer eleven years his senior. Before Alex can call him for help on his new case, Gus has a chilling psychic vision while reading a patient’s CT scan: the words STAY AWAY FROM HER form on the image.

Just as Alex begins searching for leads in the Klink homicide, the killer strikes again. Another victim is discovered buried in a shallow grave in another cemetery, his crudely fashioned cardboard tombstone reading:

I should have guessed

it would come to this

That I would dig my own grave

That I would pay for my sins.

Here I rest. Never in peace.

Now Alex knows that the killer made his victims dig their graves before murdering them. The second victim is quickly identified as Dr. Barry Schultz, a wealthy and prominent plastic surgeon. When Alex gives Schultz’s wife Carla the bad news, he finds her strangely devoid of emotion.

What’s more, she actually smokes a joint in front of him and offers him a hit, then acts worried and suspicious when he discusses searching the house for clues to who might have killed her husband. Later, she confesses that she feared she would be suspected when the police found out that she’d planted a tracking device in her husband’s car because she suspected him of “screwing a drag queen” on the side.

After Alex calls Gus Parker to inform him of the second murder, the psychic experiences another vision: the words STAY AWAY FROM HER written in big red letters on the back wall of his and Billie’s property. Nevertheless, he tries to help Alex with his investigation.

It turns out that their murder victims, Davis Klink and Barry Schultz, were old college buddies – spoiled rich kids who attended the same Ivy League school – though Klink’s wife never heard of Schultz and Shultz’s wife never heard of Klink. When their killer claims a third victim, that man is neither rich nor prominent – he’s a loser with a failed life and a criminal record.

As Alex and Gus hunt down a sadistic killer with a deadly grudge, they find a surprising connection to the mysterious disappearance of a college student during her spring break vacation in Cancún, nearly twenty-five years earlier. Unfortunately, Alex’s psychic ace in the hole soon goes missing himself.

A ghost from Billie Welch’s past has come back to haunt her – an obsessed, deluded, violent psychopath named Richard Knight has just been released after serving a long prison sentence for stalking her in the past. Now he wants to eliminate the only thing standing between him and Billie – her new boyfriend, Gus Parker…

A harrowing, riveting, addictive page-turner, author Steven Cooper outdoes himself with Dig Your Grave. I can hardly wait for the next entry in the series! Highly recommended!

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com.