Helpful Score: 3
I should have read the backcover "decidedly adult foray" so the descriptive sex scenes didnot surprise me.But once got over the shock,it really was not that bad. The murder mystery was good. I especially liked that ambiguouaness of the narrator -good guy?bad guy?
Helpful Score: 2
Intelligent & well written, I found it hard to put down.
Helpful Score: 1
A great read, keeps you guessing till the surprise end!
Helpful Score: 1
"...follow the narrative down a road of personal discovery and shocking revelation, and just when you think you've got everything mapped Thayer twists down another avenue of inquiry you hadn't even considered." Amazon
Helpful Score: 1
I really enjoyed this book! It definitely wasn't a horror novel but it was a great mystery. Thayer really made me feel as if I were in Wisconsin in 1960, and for that it was very good. I didn't think the novel and crime descriptions were too graphic but as vague as I thought Thayer was, I was still able to get a clear enough picture of the characters and events in my mind. Overall, although I enjoyed the book, I didn't think the plot was very original. I'll be keeping an eye out for more of Thayer's work but I won't necessarily be tracking more of his books down.
Helpful Score: 1
A different approach to a whodunit. Story is told in first person and keeps your interested until the very twisted end.
CHRISTOPHER R. (exterminator) reviewed The Wheat Field (Pliny Pennington, Bk 1) on + 29 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
I found this story very captivating. Reads in first person narrative as a sheriff of a small town explains a series of murders and a special event that happens in the wheat field and his obsession with a girl named Maggie. Highly recommend this one. Very hard to put down.
A different mystery that does catch you by surprise.
An adult foray leads to murder. Gruesome, disturbing and erotically charged. A must read!!
Publishers Weekly
Shockwaves rock a 1960s small town when the grisly shotgun murder of two leading citizens sets the town's deputy sheriff against the sheriff and the politically powerful Gunn Club set. Deputy Pliny Pennington has carried a torch for Maggie Butler since their Kickapoo Falls, Wis., high school days, though she scornfully rejected him in favor of boys higher up the social ladder. When she is found in the middle of a wheat field with her face blown off beside her dead husband, Michael, Pliney is assigned the case and is promptly targeted by sinister forces intent on framing him for the murders. Shaken by the killings, a state cop admits to joining Maggie and Michael in sex games; Senate candidate Webster Sprague and his wife, Caren, were involved, too. Events get complex when Caren, who's seemingly run away with lots of Webster's money, calls Pliny long distance and feeds him clues that lead to sex film tapes giving leverage over Webster and perhaps revealing the killer in the wheat field. But just as Pliny gets close to a solution, he finds himself set up to take the fall for an even more heinous crime than the double murder, one linked to the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential race. Though the political connection is less than credible, Thayer has a knack for building tension and defining place, and his smalltown sinners are all too believable. The spectacular ending is only slightly marred by the questionable plot device that gets Pliny there. Agent, Elaine Koster. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Shockwaves rock a 1960s small town when the grisly shotgun murder of two leading citizens sets the town's deputy sheriff against the sheriff and the politically powerful Gunn Club set. Deputy Pliny Pennington has carried a torch for Maggie Butler since their Kickapoo Falls, Wis., high school days, though she scornfully rejected him in favor of boys higher up the social ladder. When she is found in the middle of a wheat field with her face blown off beside her dead husband, Michael, Pliney is assigned the case and is promptly targeted by sinister forces intent on framing him for the murders. Shaken by the killings, a state cop admits to joining Maggie and Michael in sex games; Senate candidate Webster Sprague and his wife, Caren, were involved, too. Events get complex when Caren, who's seemingly run away with lots of Webster's money, calls Pliny long distance and feeds him clues that lead to sex film tapes giving leverage over Webster and perhaps revealing the killer in the wheat field. But just as Pliny gets close to a solution, he finds himself set up to take the fall for an even more heinous crime than the double murder, one linked to the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy presidential race. Though the political connection is less than credible, Thayer has a knack for building tension and defining place, and his smalltown sinners are all too believable. The spectacular ending is only slightly marred by the questionable plot device that gets Pliny there. Agent, Elaine Koster. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
This one is a Mystery, horror book. I really couldnt get into it. It is a man who is a retired lawman and he is telling the story of the woman he loved his entire life. The girl died in a cornfield in 1960. It was okay. My husband read it adn loved it so much he bought 2 more Steve Thayer books so he says 5 stars
Maggie and Michael Butler are found naked and very dead in a Wisconsin wheat field, murdered by two vicious shotgun blast. but no one gets murdered in Kackapoo Falls, bucolic vacation retreat in the Wisconsin Dells, and home of the politically powerful Kickapoo Gunn Club. It is up to Deputy Pennington, the trusted number two man in the Sheriff's Department, to find the killer. The town's ruling elite closed ranks as the outsider Pennington zeros in on the truth.
There are hardly ever any murders in Kickapoo Falls, Wisconsin - bucolic vacation retreat in the Wisconsin Dells, and home of the politically powerful Kickapoo Gunn Club. In 1960 however, the naked bodies of a married couple - Michael and Maggie Butler - are found in a wheat field; viciously shot to death. It falls to Deputy P. A. Pennington, the trusted number-two man in the Kickapoo Falls Sheriff's Department, to find the killer.
Pliny had been in love with Maggie Butler ever since childhood, admiring her from afar for years, and watching as she eventually married another man. However, he has a hard time holding on to his fantasy of her, as he begins to discover what she was mixed up with in reality.
The oddness of the murder scene - both bodies are found within a perfect circle of crushed wheat, with absolutely no footprints or tire tracks to be found at the scene - combined with the fact that the couple's clothes are missing, and Maggie is wearing only her wedding ring but not her class ring as well; strikes Pliny as incredibly strange. The only clues that he has to work with are a Lucky Strike cigarette butt found lying near the bodies and three perfect holes in the flattened wheat.
The motive appears to Pliny to be sexual in nature; a belief which is corroborated when Trooper Russ Hoffmeyer, one of the investigators at the scene, admits to taking part in a menage a trois with Michael and Maggie Butler in the past. Their entire sexual encounter had been filmed and, according to Trooper Hoffmeyer, that film was now missing.
Pliny finds that the closer he gets to the truth, the tighter that the town's ruling elite closes ranks against him. Almost as if following some shadowy master plan, the sheriff, his one-time mentor, begins to turn against him and Pliny becomes the main murder suspect; in danger of being arrested for the double homicide. He is convinced that the answer lies hidden in the wheat field, and in a missing reel of movie film - that will ultimately shut the door on a murder investigation, but immediately open another one onto a deadly election night conspiracy.
I really enjoyed reading this book. In my opinion, the plot was thoroughly intriguing and moved along very quickly. I avidly wanted to learn the murderer's identity, and was enmeshed in the the story until I finally understood their motive. I give this book a definite A+!
Pliny had been in love with Maggie Butler ever since childhood, admiring her from afar for years, and watching as she eventually married another man. However, he has a hard time holding on to his fantasy of her, as he begins to discover what she was mixed up with in reality.
The oddness of the murder scene - both bodies are found within a perfect circle of crushed wheat, with absolutely no footprints or tire tracks to be found at the scene - combined with the fact that the couple's clothes are missing, and Maggie is wearing only her wedding ring but not her class ring as well; strikes Pliny as incredibly strange. The only clues that he has to work with are a Lucky Strike cigarette butt found lying near the bodies and three perfect holes in the flattened wheat.
The motive appears to Pliny to be sexual in nature; a belief which is corroborated when Trooper Russ Hoffmeyer, one of the investigators at the scene, admits to taking part in a menage a trois with Michael and Maggie Butler in the past. Their entire sexual encounter had been filmed and, according to Trooper Hoffmeyer, that film was now missing.
Pliny finds that the closer he gets to the truth, the tighter that the town's ruling elite closes ranks against him. Almost as if following some shadowy master plan, the sheriff, his one-time mentor, begins to turn against him and Pliny becomes the main murder suspect; in danger of being arrested for the double homicide. He is convinced that the answer lies hidden in the wheat field, and in a missing reel of movie film - that will ultimately shut the door on a murder investigation, but immediately open another one onto a deadly election night conspiracy.
I really enjoyed reading this book. In my opinion, the plot was thoroughly intriguing and moved along very quickly. I avidly wanted to learn the murderer's identity, and was enmeshed in the the story until I finally understood their motive. I give this book a definite A+!
