Fans of Very Bad Things might enjoy Graverobbers Wanted: No Experience Necessary

What starts off as an innocent meeting over coffee between friends turns into an unusual job proposal from a woman Andrew and Roger have never met. The gig? $20,000 to dig up a coffin and find a key.

Seems simple enough. The coffin isn’t buried that deep, it is in a private place, and they don’t have to do anything with the body. Just find the key and rebury the coffin. Except when they unearth the pine box, the man inside isn’t dead. At least not immediately, and suddenly, $20,000 doesn’t seem like enough.

Crossbow darts fly. Someone gets knocked unconscious. Andrew and Roger end up in a secluded cabin, bag over their heads, potentially eavesdropping on a murder. Flash forward to the ditch they are dumped in, their hitchhiking misadventures with a man called The Apparition, and the ultimate cat-and-mouse game that ensues, and Andrew and Roger wish they had never involved themselves with the likes of Ghoulish Delights, a choose-your-own-horror-adventure company whose real product is much darker than amateur horror films.

This story is a super-fast read that I knocked out in three sittings. One of those books where the plot twists go from bad to worse. I had to know what was going to happen next as poor Andrew Mayhem’s life gets dismantled over the course of a few terrible days. He’s a lovable loser as characters go, and I mean that in the best possible way. The guy just doesn’t win a lot. He means well. He loves his wife and kids, but if something can get screwed up, it feels like he’s the man for the job. He tries so hard to uncover the identity of the killer in this gore-fest amateur sleuth mystery akin to Saw or Hostel in horror intensity.

Probably not for the squeamish, this one involves a lot of dismemberment and still manages to be mildly clever. I’ve been on a horror-comedy run with Jack Townsend’s Tales from the Gas Station and now Jeff Strand’s Graverobbers Wanted: No Experience Necessary, which feel a little like Max Booth III’s How to Successfully Kidnap Strangers only in the escalating bumbling of inept-but-comical main characters. If you like the horror-comedy mashup, you can do worse than any of these books, of which Graverobbers Wanted holds distinction as most gruesome.

A fun read and the first in a five-book series featuring Andrew Mayhem, Graverobbers Wanted: No Experience Necessary earns a solid four-star rating and is recommended for fans of the genre with stronger constitutions. I can’t wait for book two, already cued up on my Kindle.
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Introducing Andrew Mayhem & his best friend Roger. Andrew is between jobs and is currently doing a little P.I. work by photographing cheating spouses. A chance meeting with a woman who has a high paying, slightly illegal job has Andrew seeing easy money. What starts out as a "dig up a coffin & retrieve a key from it" turns into so much more. The client is now missing, dead people are turning up, and a killer has drawn Andrew into a game of sick proportions. Trying to solve the mystery with the help of Roger and trying to keep his wife & kids safe has Andrew digging deep for any courage he has left to finish the game that may end of in his death ( )

Good mix of horror, humor and detective style mystery.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to rate this one at times. A solid three at the start that I didn’t think would catch on beyond that. Some of the actions of the supporting characters, like the cops' decisions after some dire circumstances, left me saying, "yeah right, they wouldn’t step aside after something like that!"

But Strand pulls everything together by the end, leaving me with enough answers to those borderline plausible situations to be satisfied. He plays with a few recognizable crutches of the genre, like the evil villain explaining everything behind his master plan, but there’s a self awareness to it that makes it work.

If this was a ten star scale, I’d rank this a 7ish, or the equivalent, 3.7ish, which rounds this up to a 4...

Andrew Mayhem is just what he sounds like—a bumbling novice detective in a truly horrific situation. ( )

this is it, this is the aesthetic i aim for in my stories. this book didnt skimp on either horror or humor and apologized for neither the horrific puns it made or the murders it described. can't wait to read the next one~ ( )

If somebody comes up to you and offers you $20K to dig up a grave and retrieve a key from the coIf somebody comes up to you and offers you $20K to dig up a grave and retrieve a key from the corpse, it would be a wise idea to turn down the assignment. However, Andrew Mayhem, a married father of two small children, is anything but wise. He can’t hold down a job and makes some seriously bad decisions. Despite that, he has some endearing qualities, and when push comes to shove, he’ll do whatever he has to, to keep his children safe. When Andrew and his friend take the assignment, the corpse turns out to be alive and wielding a gun. Things only get worse from there as Andrew comes across Ghoulish Delights, which fronts as a production company for hire for people wanting to star in short horror movies. It becomes very apparent to Andrew that Ghoulish Delights is a front for something far more serious.

This is the first novel I’ve read from Jeff Strand that is geared to adults. He’s great at young adult novels, and as it turns out, he’s pretty good at writing more mature themes. The protagonist is a very flawed character, and at first I wasn’t entirely fond of him, but as the book wore on, I grew more fond of him, particularly late in the novel when he had to save his children from serious harm. It’s something that any parent can relate to. My biggest quibble with the novel was that there were a couple of scenes that were a bit unrealistic and it became hard to suspend disbelief. What worked really well was how things just kept getting worse and worse for Andrew, and he had to show some serious mettle and resourcefulness to get out of them. This novel highlighted one of the things I really enjoy about Strand’s writing—his ability to put the screws to his characters and put them in some difficult situations, and just when you think it can’t get any worse for them, they do. This was an enjoyable novel, and I look forward to reading the second in the series.

Carl Alves - author of Battle of the Soul ( )