The Wheat Field

"I am an old man in love with a ghost.

"...That's the kind of line that can really grab a reader. Steve Thayer uses it at the beginning of The Wheat Field, a novel as haunting as its opening suggests.... The old man in this time-shifting narrative is Pliny Pennington, a retired Wisconsin lawman ruminating on his lifelong obsession with Maggie Butler, 'a dark-haired devil of a girl' who ran with every man in town except the one who loved her best. In a voice pitched to the intimacy of a whisper.

Pennington takes us back to the summer of 1960, when, as a young sheriff's deputy in Kickapoo Falls, he discovers Maggie and her husband, stark naked and shot to death, lying in a mysterious crop circle in the middle of a wheat field.... Was Maggie actually dabbling in dark arts--or does her avidly erotic nature just seem evil to Pennington, a sexually repressed voyeur caught up in the seduction of memory ... Like all nostalgia-tinged memories, his are no more to be trusted than our own."

-- The New York Times