If you like mysteries that are ingeniously crafted, finely written, and full of fascinating mental pictures, anything by John Armistead will suffice. A gifted author from the same soil that gave us John Grisham, Willie Morris, and Barry Hannah, Armistead captures the culture of his southern home state to provide the crime-solving setting for some of life's universal good-and-evil predicaments. His imaginative mind, diverse background, and unique insight into the human story converge to offer us some of the better books to be read in a while. I anxiously await the next complex case in the clever career of my now favorite lawman, the Sheffield Sheriff, Grover Bramlett. Keep writing, John, and I will keep buying!

I cannot wait for my children to read Dr. John's newest book. In a time when we desperately need to be coming together as a nation, this book hits on the emotional level that children can understand how we as a society need to accept each other. Children will identify with the familial ties that bind us as well as the friendship ties that help build our character in times of trouble. I hope my children see the bigger issues in this story and appreciate the real history that unfolds. I love the way Dr. John has ordinary children doing extraordinary feats. His children, his characters remind me of the humble men in the Bible that God used. Ironic...I don't think so. The weaving of morality,spirituality, and frail humanity make these the kind of stories you want your children to aspire and be inspired by. You get a package deal with Dr. John: moral responsibility, spiritual gauges, and a fascinating history lesson. Great Work!!!

We found this book to be very adventurous. The author keeps you in suspense,and involves you in the lives of the children by using visual imagery. This book displays how families with different cultures and values live in the rural south. It also shows how some cultures and diverse people in past years were not excepted.
As a teacher, you could use this book in your classroom to teach students about diversity and differences among cultures. It teaches children to accept and respect cultures that are different from their own. We thank the author for giving us a glimpse of cultural diversity in the past and teaching us to accept everyone for their differences.

I originally began reading this book for my six year old daughter. When she was ready to stop, I couldn't. I read the book, almost completely, straight through. It will make you laugh; It will make your heart race with our young heros'; and most definitely, at risk of sounding cliche, it will make you cry; as I found myself doing when I reached the end. Wonderful for both its pains and its triumphs.

This is a cozy in the best Christie tradition: a murder in the family, many suspects, the reading of the will, even a butler . . . but what a butler! As is to be expected, there are skeletons-lots of them, and in a Southern mansion on the scale of Tara there are plenty of closets to house them. Maggie McLendon knows little about her widowed father's family, since Gerard McLendon has always been strangely reluctant to ever talk about them. Then, a letter arrives from Gerard's aunt informing him that his father's death is fast approaching. In spite of his protests, Maggie accompanies him to the magnificent family home. There, she meets a host of relatives, along with her grandfather, who is in fact on his deathbed. That very evening someone hastens him along. In the days that follow, Maggie discovers why her father was estranged from his family, and she then untangles the skeins of the McLendon past to finally reveal the murderer. The author could have done the reader a favor by providing a genealogy somewhere at the beginning to help with the bewildering cast of characters and their equally bewildering kinship, but once one has overcome that hurdle, CRUEL AS THE GRAVE emerges as a very readable, traditional mystery novel.

This writer has potential. The story line is interesting, and I wanted to read to the end. The characters were fairly amusing, too. It's kind of a Heat of the Night scenario, with the sherriff and his deputies not unlike the TV show.

However, I feel this book could not have received the attention it merited from its editors. There are some extremely irritating style quirks that made me want to stop reading entirely, but I pushed on because I did want to see "who dunnit.(By the way, the ending is anticlimactic, another problem. Frankly, I barely cared who dunnit. It was a side character that just wasn't quite involved or interesting enough, and sort of came on the scene suddenly.)

Back to the style problems, and I'll just write about the two most glaring ones.

First, it is not necessary in fiction to keep repeating the full name, first and last, of a main character. It really gets in the way of this writer's work. The sherriff's full name is continually repeated, as are both of his deputies. There is a deputy named H.C. Curry, for example. For some reason, the author was in love with that name, because he used it, over and over and over again, ad naseum. Unnecessary! We got who he was talking about, again and again.

Also: I got really bored by the descriptions of so many shocked peoples' eyes widening, getting wider, being wide open, flying wide open, etc., etc., etc. These stylistic techniques mark the amateur writer. Once again - he has potential, but somebody (hopefully his editor) should give him a tune-up because it's kind of silly, really, especially when the book is about serious material (racial tension, etc.)

Oh, and one more thing: I found it rather unbelievable that a young, educated African American southern male would not know about the history of the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the south. It just didn't cut it that H.C. (notice that you don't need to repeat the whole name to get the picture) needed a three-hour lecture from his father about how bad things were. Only one thing might have redeemed this point: if we were let in on some of the well-researched history, and really learned something new ourselves.