Garden of the Dead

March 21, 2011
The prolific Neiderman, best known for The Devil's Advocate after its big-screen treatment, treads water with this subpar thriller. An unusual request disrupts the pedestrian existence of upstate New Yorker Randy Quinn, a bachelor who's been a loner all his life thanks to his family's businessâa cemetery and funeral home. Evelyn Kitchen, who was the object of Quinn's desire in high school, and her snobby twin brother, Stuart, claim that their late father, successful businessman Matthew Kitchen, asked to be buried with "his Rolex, gold necklace, gold bracelet and diamond wedding ring." Quinn tries to keep the elder Kitchen's being buried with valuable jewelry under wraps, but when he suspects the man's grave has been disturbed, he digs up the coffin and makes an upsetting discovery that plunges him into a murder mystery. A dull lead and a slow-moving plot make for a dull read.

April 1, 2011

Veteran Neiderman (Angel of Mercy, 1994, etc.) tangles an inoffensive gravedigger in a web of accusations that spiral into murder.

Randy Quinn is a man of simple tastes. He's never attended college, never left his upstate New York hometown and never—except for his continued, unrequited attraction to Evelyn Kitchen, his high-school crush—dreamed of a future more fulfilling than keeping Sandburg Cemetery in apple-pie order for his bosses, Jack Waller and Richard Valentine. His amatory interest in divorced waitress Scarlet Moore hardly rises to the status of romance. The biggest recent development in Randy's life is the return of Barry Palmer, his best friend in school, from a disastrous marriage in the Southwest. During a night of decorous carousing, Randy offers Barry a job at the cemetery and then watches his life go up in flames. During a chance return to the office with Scarlet after their date the following night, he realizes that someone has disturbed the grave of Matthew Kitchen, whose son Stuart, Evelyn's twin, insisted be buried with his expensive jewelry. Instead of calling police chief Lou Siegman, Randy, in the first of many remarkably stupid miscalculations, decides to dig up the grave with Scarlet's help in order to see whether the old man is still attired in his finery. What he and Scarlet discover will make him think twice about having hired Barry—but not, evidently, about much else that he takes for granted but shouldn't.

A perfectly reasonable premise for a thriller undermined by a goodhearted hero too dumb to be true.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011
Randy Quinn is a bachelor and a cemetery manager, and some people think hes a bit odd. But so what? Hes comfortable with his life. When the son and daughter of a wealthy man demand to bury their father with some pricey baubles, Randy has a bad feeling. Grave robbers, he knows, arent just characters in horror stories, and when, sure enough, the wealthy mans grave is interfered with, Randy discovers something truly frightening. Theres something inside the coffin with the dead man, something that definitely shouldnt be there. Although there are dark overtones here, the book leans as much toward mystery as horror, and while its appeal to the prolific Neidermans many fans can be taken for granted, the book is also recommendable to mystery and thriller readers who ordinarily stay away from writers associated with the horror genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)