Sheriff James Cohen is struggling with an aged and impaired father, a recalcitrant teenaged son, a wife who loves him but who has left him, and growing legal and financial woes. Then local crime-writer/heavy-drinker Peter Conner calls in to say his son, Lucas, is missing, and Cohen’s life starts tipping into a black hole.

In His Favourite Graves, Cleave takes us back to Acacia Pines, U.S.A., the setting for his Whatever it Takes. Acacia Pines rivals the number of murderers in Midsummer with the number of its psychopaths. And the plotting of Cleave’s latest offering is, as always, complex and blind-sides the reader over and over again.  

Also as usual is that the moral flexibility of Cleave’s characters is contortionist-level. Motivation for bad deeds is presented as pecuniary, genetic, or medical. I was thinking Cleave had gone one twist, and one element, too far, in His Favourite Graves, until I looked that one element up, and as is often the case with crime fiction, the author had just done his research.

His Favourite Graves is not for the faint-hearted, its depiction of school bullying is extremely disturbing, as is the other violence that occurs through the text with increasing frequency. The novel includes teenage suicide and sexual violence.

Cleave manages to present the tragic side of events as well, the devastation of losing loved ones, especially children, to violence and the sadness of losing parents to Alzheimer’s. There is the irony of some crimes preventing others, or of some successful interventions causing worse crimes down the track.

The amplification of crime via social media, used as a means of bullying, but also as a threat to keep quiet, is cleverly plotted, as is the anonymity provided by the Internet, and its availability to those who know their way around a smart phone. The theme of intergenerational abuse is entwined with the complicity of some in the crimes of their family and friends. There is also the awful, and justifiable, lack of faith that adults will provide any protection for kids against the dangers of the world.

Cleave creates great atmosphere, there’s a large dark root-bound forest, a dank, abandoned sawmill, a small town full of the memories of past tragedies, a building storm, and an eventual deluge. “The hospital hallways smell like science class during chemistry and look like science class during biology.” The thoughts of characters, warped though they often are, make disturbing sense: “The world balances out by having only good things happen to some people, and only bad things to others.”

His Favourite Graves is a masterclass in letting your reader know what your protagonists don’t, letting them sit back and watch as the characters get into trickier and more dangerous situations. It is a stand-alone thriller, but those familiar with Cleave’s earlier work will pick up on recurring themes, and he has sprinkled his text with gestures to the titles of some of his previous books. He also plays with how crime writers get, and use, their ideas. If you are into hard-edged thrillers, read His Favourite Graves!