It all started on a lazy afternoon when the local small town sheriff, Lonnie Bates, showed up on Turner's front porch with a bottle of Wild Turkey held out as a peace offering.  From that point on, Turner, who had moved to this small town in Tennessee to retire, found himself right in the middle of what he was best trying to avoid.  Sheriff Bates had a problem and he was self-admittedly "in over his head." 

Two local kids had parked at an abandoned house on the outskirts of town, and instead of getting the make-out session they were aiming for, they come face-to-face with a gruesome crime scene. What looked to be a homeless man had been impaled on a stake, similar to how a scarecrow would be, and was wired into a strange position to a fence.  Knowing that Turner used to be a big-city cop and a psychotherapist, Sheriff Bates asks him to be a consultant on the case.  Who had murdered this homeless man?  Who was he and why had he been so badly mutilated?

James Sallis is an extremely talented writer who has had to have spent time in the South.  As almost everyone knows, things, including people, tend to move a little slower in the South and this story grasps that very feeling.  When I first started this novel, I was almost put off by how slowly it was moving.  I stuck with it, however, figuring that the pace would eventually speed up.  Well, it never did, but now after finishing CYPRESS GROVE, I understand why it didn't and I am in awe of Mr. Sallis's ability to enable the reader to FEEL the leisure of the South.  This tale reads like a familiar slow song on the radio that makes you want to grab a cold glass of ice tea and sit on your front porch.  When the story is over and done, you are left longing for more. 

The story of Turner is more than just another story of an ex-cop though.  It is the story of a man who started out a soldier, became a cop, went to prison for 11-years to earn the title of both ex-con and college graduate, practiced psychotherapy for a while and then decided he was tired of life and cities and people, so he packed up all his worldly good and moved to a cabin in the near wilderness.

This is the story of a man on the eternal road to find grace, who thinks that it resides in loneliness and is surprised that it really lives in a small town.  In a small town somewhere between Memphis and nowhere.  "I'd come here to excuse myself, to further what I perceived as exemption, to withdraw from humanity.  Instead I had found myself rejoining it." However, by rejoining it, Turner found the grace he had been searching for in the faces of all his new friends and in the face of his newfound love. Turner learned an important lesson..."Instruments should be played.  Just as lives should be lived."