Book Report: Over Tumbled Graves

8. Jess Walter, Over Tumbled Graves (2001) (2/9/21)

I don't even know what made me think of Jess Walter when I was searching for a new, preferably page-turner book the other day. I remember really enjoying his The Financial Lives of Poets (2009) and Beautiful Ruins (2012). I couldn't begin, now, to tell you what the first was about, but I remember the basic plot and mood (ebullient?) of the second. His range is broad and eclectic. And for some reason (maybe the fact that he has a brand-new book out?), Over Tumbled Graves wiggled into my mind the other day, and I happened to know on just which shelf it resided.

This, Walter's first novel (of seven), is a mystery-thriller, but it's also very much about the place it's set in—Spokane, Washington, Walter's hometown—and the relationships of people depicted in it. So it's not just about (a) murder, (b) police investigation, (c) murder solved. It's more than that. With a twist at the end that I expected but was not at all disappointed to see. It wasn't one of those out-of-left-field twists; it felt organic to the whole.

The basic plot involves the search for a killer, which quickly overlaps with the discovery of one, then two, and ultimately five murdered prostitutes, several of them laid out along a riverbank as if to gather attention—of the FBI variety. There are a couple of detectives, good at what they do, who have an unrequited thing for each other. There are a couple of FBI profilers who despise each other. The killer at the start is observed and followed, but although he remains elusive to the cops, we readers get to know him a little, and to sympathize with him. And through all of this, the neighborhoods and shady areas and river of Spokane draw us along.

I did not flag any passages, but I did make a mental note of page 303, and this is what's there. It's from the POV of Detective Alan Dupree, a worn-out homicide detective who's pushing 50 and being superseded by a young, unimaginative guy with up-to-date, high-tech training.

The tired houses and dead lawns at the base of the South Hill reminded him of an old theory. The theory of yard relativity. He believed you could tell a criminal by the amount of yardwork he did. He'd first come up with the theory in neighborhoods like this one, responding to a thousand fights and drug deals and domestics, and after a time it dawned on him that he was almost never called to houses with well-kept yards. This wasn't an economic or racial thing. It was a pure yardwork thing, the basic theory being that criminals don't have the patience for yardwork. That's what crime is, he believed—a lack of patience. Want to get rich quick? Get laid without all the work? Want to get rid of your business partner without the trouble of suing him or paying him off? That's the difference between criminals and real people. Patience.

Walter is a great observer—of detail, but also of character and desire and where a person stands on the sliding spectrum from earnestness to wiseassery, energy to exhaustion, engagement to desperation. The people in his books always seem very real to me. I admire that in any writer, and I admire Walter for pushing the envelope and trying out new situations, characters, and motivations.