Free Ebook Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves
Yeah, investing time to read the book Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves by on-line can likewise offer you good session. It will ease to interact in whatever problem. By doing this could be a lot more appealing to do as well as simpler to check out. Now, to get this Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves, you can download in the link that we offer. It will certainly help you to obtain very easy way to download the publication Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves.
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves
Free Ebook Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves
When you are hurried of work target date as well as have no concept to obtain motivation, Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves book is among your options to take. Book Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves will certainly give you the ideal resource and also thing to get motivations. It is not only concerning the works for politic business, management, economics, as well as various other. Some got jobs making some fiction works likewise need inspirations to overcome the work. As just what you require, this Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves will most likely be your choice.
Undoubtedly, to boost your life quality, every e-book Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves will have their specific driving lesson. Nonetheless, having particular awareness will make you really feel much more confident. When you feel something occur to your life, in some cases, reviewing publication Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves can assist you to make calmness. Is that your genuine hobby? Often indeed, however in some cases will certainly be unsure. Your choice to check out Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves as one of your reading books, could be your appropriate publication to review now.
This is not about just how much this publication Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves expenses; it is not likewise regarding exactly what kind of e-book you really enjoy to check out. It has to do with what you could take and receive from reviewing this Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves You can prefer to select other publication; but, it does not matter if you try to make this publication Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves as your reading choice. You will not regret it. This soft documents e-book Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves can be your buddy regardless.
By downloading this soft documents book Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves in the online web link download, you are in the first action right to do. This website really supplies you simplicity of the best ways to get the most effective e-book, from best vendor to the brand-new released e-book. You can locate more publications in this site by visiting every web link that we supply. One of the collections, Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves is one of the very best collections to market. So, the first you get it, the very first you will get all good for this e-book Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, By Sarah Graves
In this new Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, a killer with a screw loose sets his sights on Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree, whose latest renovation project becomes a dire matter of life and deck.
Driving to a cottage in the Maine woods with her best friend, Ellie White, Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree has a challenging week ahead of her. She bet her husband that she could finish building the cottage porch in only a few days—a lofty goal for even the craftiest home renovator. But as Jake and Ellie set to work, they soon realize that they’re not alone. Dewey Hooper, a recently escaped convict, is watching them. Jake’s testimony got him sent away for murder years ago and here, in the remote wilderness, he can exact his revenge. Tough as nails and not afraid to defend themselves, Jake and Ellie are determined to keep their wits about them—to prevent the quaint little cottage from turning into the ultimate death trap.
Praise for Sarah Graves and the Home Repair Is Homicide series
“Readers won’t be able to put this page-turner down—but it will certainly make them think twice about vacationing at that Maine lakeside cottage.”—Leslie Meier, author of the Lucy Stone mysteries
“Just hearing her list the ways you can kill yourself fixing up an old house . . . is a hoot.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Graves makes rehabbing shutters and other chores suspenseful.”—The Boston Globe
Complete with Home Repair Is Homicide repair tips!
- Sales Rank: #467816 in Books
- Brand: Graves, Sarah
- Published on: 2012-11-27
- Released on: 2012-11-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.86" h x .92" w x 4.18" l, .37 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 352 pages
Review
Advance praise for Dead Level
“Readers won’t be able to put this page-turner down—but it will certainly make them think twice about vacationing at that Maine lakeside cottage.”—Leslie Meier
“Sarah Graves continues successfully reinventing her much beloved Home Repair Is Homicide series. Her newest is a terrific thriller and an all-around treat, bearing Graves’s trademarks: edgy traditional mysteries peppered liberally with humor, and sprinkled with layered, well-written characters. This series is better than ever!”—Julia Spencer-Fleming
Praise for Sarah Graves and the Home Repair Is Homicide series
“Just hearing her list the ways you can kill yourself fixing up an old house . . . is a hoot.”—The New York Times Book Review
“What distinguishes the novel are its likable, no-nonsense protagonist-narrator, her references to home repair that the author cleverly fits tongue-and-groove into the story and, especially, the detailed descriptions of the town.”—Los Angeles Times
“Graves makes rehabbing shutters and other chores suspenseful.”—The Boston Globe
“Nail-biting suspense that ensnares the reader . . . full of courageous women and compelling action. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Sarah Graves lives with her husband in an 1823 Federal-style house in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels are set. When she is not scraping, painting, glazing, sanding, hammering, or otherwise repairing (or failing to repair!) the old house, she is working on her next Home Repair Is Homicide novel, A Bat in the Belfrey.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
To remove screws easily, use a screwdriver bit and the “reverse” setting on your electric drill. —Tiptree’s Tips Harold had Facebook, and LiveJournal, and Twitter. He had a BlackBerry, an iPad, an iPod, and a third-generation Kindle.
He had a pain, mild but constant, a fluttery twinge in the soft tissue just above his left eye, deep in the hollow where you’d put your thumb if you were going to try lifting him by his cranium. Sometimes late at night, in his tiny apartment in a grimly forgotten, perpetually unfashionable corner of Lower Manhattan, he would find himself Googling: twinge, eye, flutter. Or: thumb, skull.
When it occurred to him what that last pair rhymed with— numbskull—he stopped Googling it. But he couldn’t forget.
Each weekday, Harold took the subway to his job at a video store a few blocks from Ground Zero, a place with a sale bin out front and a sputtery neon sign in the grimy window. Once it had thrived, but the only videos people rented nowadays were ones they wouldn’t dare view on the Internet for fear of prison time.
The films didn’t have brightly illustrated cardboard sleeves, or even titles. Furtive men—no women, in Harold’s depressingly extensive experience—entered the store with money in hand, and asked without looking up at Harold for number 19, or number 204.
Harold wondered if they were ashamed of themselves, or if maybe they just didn’t like seeing his eye twitch. If maybe they were creeped out by him. What he didn’t wonder was what kind of unspeakably sordid images the videos contained; he needed the job too much for that.
But after three years in the store—the sputtering neon sign, the nagging eye pain, the worn black plastic cassettes or clear jewel cases that he wiped thoroughly with spray cleaner anytime one of them got returned—he also needed a vacation. So when the store’s owner laid Harold off for two weeks due to cash-flow problems, he decided to go to Maine.
He’d never been, just seen pictures of the place. Probably Maine colors weren’t as bright as they looked in the pages of magazines, with lighthouses as red-and-white-striped as new candy canes, and water as blue as . . . well, nothing in this life was ever really that blue, Harold felt sure.
But it didn’t matter what it was like there. It was the idea of Maine that attracted him: clean air, not too many people. Forests you could walk into and not find your way out again, mineral-clear lakes, numbingly cold, where you could wade in and dissolve with a sigh, like a fizzy lozenge.
Not that he meant to; wade into one of those lakes, that is, and never wade out. But the idea of such wilderness—of surfaces that hadn’t been handled and breathed on, or even looked at, by millions of people—spoke deeply to him, somehow, even though he had never experienced any such place himself.
So Harold left all his electronic gadgets at home and took a bus from Port Authority to Bangor, Maine, then a smaller one whose seats were made of hard plastic. As they wound out of Bangor, the driver drank Diet Coke and blared Top Forty on the radio propped up on the cluttered dashboard while the bus juddered along the twisty, crumbling two-lane blacktop.
Hours passed while Harold stared out the window at a world growing steadily more rural and less like anything he’d ever seen before: small wooden houses with garishly colored plastic toys in their rough yards, lobster traps stacked along unpaved driveways, boats sagging on trailers. Next came lengthy stretches where it seemed no one at all lived, the unfenced fields high and boulder-studded and the forests appearing darkly impenetrable.
At last they reached a small, desolate-looking intersection marked by an out-of-business gas station and convenience store. No sign, but the driver said it was the right place; hoisting his backpack, Harold got out and the bus trundled away, leaving him alone on the gravel shoulder, which was littered with hundreds of old and new filtered cigarette butts.
All around him loomed giant evergreens, their pointed tops etched on a fiercely blue sky. A big white-headed bird—a bald eagle, Harold realized; he’d never seen one of those before, either—sailed above.
The roar of a diesel engine shattered the silence as a log truck loaded with forty-foot tree trunks hurtled past, the smell of fresh pine sap sharp in its wake. Watching it go, he felt a sudden, drowning sense of isolation and loss, as if his old life had been torn away and had yet to be replaced by anything.
If it would be. Abruptly, he wished he hadn’t come. Back in the city, he was always so surrounded and assaulted by crowds and clamor, it was easy there to pretend that he wasn’t alone.
Here it was different. Turning, he heard the gravel crunch loudly beneath his feet. A big dog barked, somewhere on the other side of a line of trees. From the rotting eaves of the boarded-up convenience store, wasps drifted, each one materializing in the gloom at the nest’s entrance, then launching itself.
Harold wondered suddenly what it was like in that nest, in the insectile dark. But he didn’t think he’d better try to find out. Just then a car pulled up to where the gas pumps used to be.
“You waitin’ for a ride?” The car was an old, dark blue Monte Carlo with the word taxi inexpertly stenciled on it in white.
The driver, a large, whiskery man wearing a fedora, chewed a cigar stub. Harold did not recall any cabdriver back in the city ever waiting so patiently or looking at him so frankly, as if genuinely engaged in this interaction and curious about Harold’s reply.
Harold hefted his backpack, which he had let down onto the cracked concrete pad that the absent gas pumps had once stood on. Ten minutes later, after crossing a causeway and traversing some of the most astonishingly beautiful geography he’d ever seen—trees, a long beach with legions of small birds striding stick-legged on it, a wide expanse of water, then more trees and water again—he reached the island city of Eastport, Maine.
“Here you go. That’ll be seven bucks. A buck a mile,” the taxi man explained around the cigar stub.
Harold blinked, still stunned by the beauty and variety of the fields, forested land, and reedy marshes he’d been whisked through, the ponds, pools, and tidal inlets he’d passed over.
Chomping the cigar, the driver eyed him wisely. “City boy, eh? Don’t worry. You stay here, you’ll get over it. Eventually,” he added with a wink, taking the ten Harold handed him.
“Keep the change,” said Harold. The Monte pulled away in a belch of gray exhaust fumes that the breeze, smelling strongly of salt water and creosote, snatched up and dispersed.
Leaving him alone, again, though here at least there were people going about their business: into the hardware store, the pizza shop, and the T-shirt-and-souvenir store all located in the three-story red-brick buildings directly before him. To his left loomed another brick edifice, an old bank now repurposed into an art gallery, with a fountain and a small terrace in front of it. There was an ornate metal park bench placed on the terrace, which he thought was a nice touch.
Right behind him was an old-fashioned diner. Through a small screened front window, he saw a long Formica counter and a series of red leatherette booths, and suddenly realized he was starving. He’d been on the road almost two days with only snacks and small bottles of juice to eat and drink, from the vending machines in various bus stations.
Turning to enter the diner, he got his first view of the bay, which even after all of the water he’d already crossed he hadn’t realized was so very near. Seeing it on a map had been one thing, the letters printed over it spelling out Passamaquoddy Bay, which he guessed must be a Native American name. But being right next to it was another, especially since thing, there was no one on it.
Or almost no one; dark blue with flocks of gulls hovering over it, the bay was narrow and extended a long way to his left and right, which he recalled from the map were north and south. A few fish- ing boats puttered, their wakes boiling white, engines puffing up clouds of diesel. The bay itself looked serene, though, not like the busy, commerce-clogged waterways at home.
He gazed for another moment, inhaling the salty air. But more delay than that, the pangs of his appetite would not allow. A whiff of grilled bacon drifted sweetly out of the diner’s screen window, seized him by the nose, and drew him hungrily in.
Half an hour later he was sopping up the last bit of egg yolk with his last corner of buttered toast. The waitress was so free with the coffee refills, he thought she’d have left the pot if he’d asked. He washed the delicious mouthful down with a sip from his freshly topped-up cup and, sighing, leaned back.
He’d made it. He’d gotten here, all the long way to Maine’s downeast coast, so far from the island of Manhattan and, as he had already begun realizing, so utterly different from it.
And he felt . . . fine. Scared, a little, and still not sure how he was getting away with such an adventurous, such a previously unthought-of, expedition. He didn’t quite trust his success yet, he guessed. But so far, so good.
Two men slid onto stools at the counter. They were in their sixties, maybe, Harold thought from their work-bent postures, and they were similarly dressed in jeans, boots, and faded plaid shirts, with Red Sox ball caps on their heads. When they spoke, continuing a conversation that had evidently begun outside, their accents amazed Harold.
“Pretty fah from heah.” The first man stirred sugar into his coffee.
“Fah,” the second man agreed. “Nawt thet fah, tho.”
They were saying that something was only somewhat far from here, Harold realized. He listened some more.
“State prison’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from here, if you’ve got a car once you make it outside the fences.” Cah.
“They didn’t say he’s got a car. In the newspaper.”
Paypah. “Maybe he didn’t. Not then. He might by now, though. Have one, that is.”
The second man drank coffee, then added, “He’s not coming here, though. I know, I know”—he put his work-worn hands up to ward off objections—“this’s where he’s from originally. Killer like that, though, he does a runner”—runnah—“he’ll hightail it to somewhere else, prob’ly. Somewhere he can blend in.”
Somewheyah. “Prob’ly,” the first man agreed, nodding sagely. “Like New York City. Hell, I guess most anyone you’d meet out on the street might be a killer, there.”
You’ve got that right, Harold thought wryly, gathering from what he’d just overheard that a convicted murderer had recently escaped from the state prison and was on the loose. But that had nothing to do with him, he told himself reassuringly. All he wanted was a walk in the woods, and there was certainly nothing there, he felt sure, to appeal to a prison escapee.
He got up from his booth. The men had turned to discussing a hunter who’d gone out three days ago and hadn’t returned. Old Bentley, they called him. Bentley Hodell; had heart trouble, poor guy. Had an attack out there, maybe—mebbe—out in the woods.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Jake as we first knew her is back, thank goodness!
By Nina M. Osier
Jacobia "Jake" Tiptree and her best friend, Ellie White, are heading for a Down East camp belonging to Jake's husband, Eastport harbor pilot Wade Sorenson, when they find a culvert on the remote woods road blocked. That's nothing unusual; the resident beaver often fills in that culvert, and the humans who use the road have to unblock it or have the road wash out. Jake, a former New York City financial advisor, moved to Eastport years ago after divorcing her brain surgeon first husband. Ellie is an Eastport native, wife of local handyman George Valentine and mother of a five-year-old daughter. Jake's only child, Sam, is a grown man of 25 now. But he still struggles with sobriety, all this time after his mother removed him from the temptations of the city where he once was well on his way to an early death from addiction or from the behavior that resulted. So when Sam meets a beautiful woman in the course of his job at the local boatyard, he finds himself reluctant to tell her that he doesn't, can't, drink alcohol. He takes the easy way out...and he winds up bound and gagged inside a motel room, because that beautiful woman and her "brother" (Sam's boat repair customer) aren't exactly what they profess to be. Meanwhile, Jake and Ellie start work on the deck that Jake has bet her husband she can build at his camp without his help. They don't know that a killer, escaped from a Maine prison and supposed to be on his way south, is actually there in the woods with them. Stalking them, and closing in to get rid of two women he hates: Jake Tiptree, whose testimony helped put him behind bars; and Ellie White, who looks uncannily like the woman he murdered. Whom he believes to be his wife, Marianne, come back to life and in need of killing all over again.
In this most recent "Home Repair is Homicide" mystery, author Graves returns to the style that originally hooked me on her heroine. She writes any passage including Jake Tiptree from Jake's viewpoint, in the first person. I am delighted! When she wants to use another character's viewpoint, Graves switches to the third person; and for me that works just fine. I did so miss seeing the story through Jake's eyes, and feeling what Jake was feeling, in the books that wrote her as well as everyone else in the third person.
This is more a thriller or suspense novel than a mystery, and as such it worked fine for me. The already familiar charaters acted as they should, and the newly introduced characters made their own kind of sense by behaving consistently, too. I particularly enjoyed ex-husband Victor Tiptree's continued presence, although Jake certainly did not enjoy it much. Exactly the kind of quirky charm that keeps me reading these books.
--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of 2005 science fiction EPPIE winner "Regs"
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Formulaic
By Amazon Customer
Once, a long time ago, Graves wrote good books. They were not as well written as now. She is much more polished (but still a long way from the top writers) but now lacks the humor and interest that she drew from her characters. If you have read any of her recent books they jumble into a sameness that, for me, says that she is more interested in getting a book out than in getting out a good book.
I stuck with her with the hope that she would get back to her roots, but only a half way through this book I shifted to skimming it and missed nothing, which is hard to do with a good author.
Several years ago, I even visited Eastport, I liked her books so much. But I am done. Too much formula and not enough of what drew me to the books in the first place.
Whoever wrote that this was bloodless obviously never read the book. Just about everyone ends up in the hospital with gunshots, timbers through their body, burns, hypothermia, cuts, bruises, auto accident injuries, blood bursts, and other general mayhem. Still, they gave it five stars which certainly makes the review suspect.
Another 5 star review has them over Mt Katahdin, which never happens in this book. But then, since she is formulaic, maybe they just confused this book with another one.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Too Many Coincidences
By kmcg
I have really enjoyed this series, but this book has too many totally unbelieveable coincidences and saving of lives to be an enjoyable book to read. It tried to cover too many activities of too many people. If someone starts the series with this book, it could be a mass of confusion.
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves PDF
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves EPub
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves Doc
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves iBooks
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves rtf
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves Mobipocket
Dead Level: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, by Sarah Graves Kindle
