Reed Lavender has an unusual advantage for a detective: the dead can tell him their last words. The trouble is that one final sentence rarely provides a tidy answer. Ashley Capes builds the Reed Lavender series around that complication, giving Reed one life as an investigator and another as a reaper while steadily tangling the two together.
Beginning with a dead teenager whose case the police consider closed, the series moves through missing family members, captured reapers, troublesome gods, and questions surrounding Reed's own parents. Melbourne provides the urban backdrop, but Reed's ability to listen to the dead gives these mysteries their distinctive pulse—and sometimes leaves him with more questions than he had before.
Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned
Reed Lavender Book 1
by Ashley Capes
Genre: Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Mystery
He can speak to the dead. But will giving them justice get him killed?
Reed Lavender lives two lives—one as a detective and another as a reaper. Hearing the last words of the dead is a handy skill in his line of work, but magic can’t solve all his problems. While investigating the case of a teen runaway, he learns his cousin is missing. Racing against the clock, Reed soon finds himself trapped in a vast conspiracy.
A cult is capturing reapers to siphon their powers and his current case is somehow connected. But the deeper he digs, the more dangerous and convoluted the trail becomes. As his two lives get tangled, Reed realizes if he can’t solve the case and save his cousin, the man who listens to the dead will end up joining them.
Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned is the first thrilling urban fantasy novel in the Reed Lavender series. If you love snarky heroes, twisty mysteries and plenty of magic, delve into Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned!
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Reed's supernatural ability does not replace detective work; it complicates it. The dead can offer him their final words, but those words may be cryptic, mundane, or nearly useless without the investigation needed to understand them. That limitation gives the paranormal element a particularly good fit with the mystery structure: magic can provide a clue, but Reed still has to determine what the clue means.
The opening case also gives the larger supernatural conflict a human center. Reed begins with Elise, a teenager whose death might otherwise be dismissed, and his determination to find answers for her pulls him toward a conspiracy involving captured reapers. Add the disappearance of his cousin and unresolved questions about his parents, and Reed's professional investigations become increasingly difficult to separate from his own history.
The Reed Lavender series is suited to urban fantasy readers who want the mystery to matter as much as the magic. Reed's ability to retrieve a dead person's final words gives crime-solving a supernatural edge without handing him an easy solution, while reapers, cults, Spirit-Worms, gods, and divine artifacts steadily expand the world around the investigations.
Readers who appreciate a snarky protagonist carrying a stubborn sense of responsibility should also find plenty to work with here. Reed keeps pursuing answers for people who can no longer demand them for themselves, even as those investigations lead directly into dangers involving his family and the supernatural forces operating throughout his city.
Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned (Reed Lavender: 1)
Chapter 1
In the bright moonlight, Reed Lavender inserted his best crowbar into the pine box where the top met the sides and wrenched the steel down. Wood squeaked and he shuddered. Worse than fingernails on a blackboard. He lifted the lid free, resting it against the freshly turned earth – which, unlike the sound of an opening coffin – was an almost pleasant thing. A pungent scent, but real. Honest. Worms and bugs, minerals and secrets lived in the earth; when you got right down to it, grave dirt wasn’t really any different to regular dirt.
And he was certainly down to it now, about to be elbow-deep in a coffin.
Again.
But for what they’d given Elise, the word ‘coffin’ was a stretch. A pine box wasn’t much of a final resting place – dignity hardly came cheap in Rikerton’s funeral home and unclaimed bodies were lucky to avoid the incinerator. Or maybe that would have been better. Dust to dust and all that.
“But then you’d be out of work,” he told himself.
Elise the runaway – that’s what the police thought she was – lay in her dirty jeans and the same faded Pink Floyd t-shirt she wore when she walked into the cafe two days back. Her arms lay at her sides, cuts on her palms mostly hidden. Her face had been covered... by a used napkin. “Jesus, Jennings, that the best you could do?” Reed growled. At least the napkin was in one piece; the undertaker had been known to be far more slipshod at times.
Reed lifted the napkin... and ground his teeth.
She’d been beaten blue. Deep bruises swam across her cheeks, one eye swollen shut and the other just as blackened, torn skin at her temple. Jennings had cleaned her face up well enough but there were still leaf fragments and dried blood in her hair. The pallor of death had washed out Elise’s freckles, mere suggestions crossing her bent nose. God, what is she, fifteen? She looks so small.
Reed tossed the napkin aside and unwound his scarf, folded it and placed it over her face, standing still a moment, shaking as he blinked. The night air ran chill fingers across his now-exposed throat and the back of his neck. Finally, he took a breath and leant over the coffin, where he lifted her arm. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said softly, twisting her silver bracelet up to the moon. Only the letters ‘Elise’ engraved there. Really, there was little he could learn from a perfunctory glance at her clothing and jewellery that the police wouldn’t have already catalogued. He’d check that later, of course – but Elise deserved more.
No, he’d have to wake her up – sort of.
Her last words would maybe be enough of a clue. Most folks didn’t have much to say, right before the end. Sometimes it was a scream or a grunt if he was unlucky. Other times, they addressed their killer. Or a loved one, perhaps, if the death was peaceful. Not that I’ve heard a lot of those in my time.
There’d been a man out west, he couldn’t recall where - so many cities and towns blended together - whose last words had been an apology for burnt toast. After that, the poor guy hadn’t said a thing before being t-boned at an intersection by a bus an hour later, two blocks from his office.
But sometimes, a person’s last sentence held a clue.
“Come on, Elise, tell me something I can use.”
If she didn’t, he had no other supernatural tricks up his sleeve either, since he couldn’t simply call upon her spirit. It would have made things much easier and allowed him to stop violating peoples’ graves but sadly, he wasn’t that lucky.
Reed removed the scarf a moment, took her cold hands and closed his eyes, sending his awareness down through her mute fingertips, pushing his way along quiet veins until he reached her chest, still echoing with the memory of a million heartbeats, then at last up the throat to the tongue; the tongue which remembered everything.
But it would move only once more.
“In the name of Mors, speak any that you might,” he whispered. “I’ll help you if you can.”
Her body resisted.
Not unusual. It meant reliving the pain and shock – why wouldn’t her body want to fight that? It was at rest now, if not at peace. But he had to know. Reed pushed harder, pouring both his hope and anger into the request. “Please, Elise.”
A flicker, a tiny sound as her jaw shifted.
He opened his eyes and leant close. Would it be a scream? A clue? Nonsense? Her voice was little more than a rasping whisper, such as might easily be mistaken for a breeze, but he caught the words.
“Wow, what a beautiful view. This is some place; you can see half the city from here.”
Then silence.
“Shit.” Poor girl, she probably never saw it coming.
Reed lowered Elise’s hands. Half the city. That hardly narrowed things down – there were only hundreds of such high points available. But it probably put the owner in a certain tax bracket at least. He shook his head. No assumptions. It was his first rule. And that went for murder too – maybe it was an accident. Still, something happened to bring Elise’s life to an unjust end.
He had to find out; no-one else was looking and Elise’s grandmother deserved answers. Even unpleasant ones, he supposed.
Reed placed the scarf back over the girl’s face and reached for his shovel.
Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned
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The Radiant King
Reed Lavender Book 2
Things aren’t exactly getting easier for Reed Lavender.
Old obligations and new cases are piling up but in the aftermath of Feronia’s defeat, answers are still too thin on the ground. But one clue – his father’s knucklebone – might just lead to something big.
To learn the truth about his parents’ disappearance, Reed will have to take the fight to whoever is behind the growing turmoil in his city. And if the rising number of Spirit-Worms, needy Gods, vindictive lawmen and only somewhat-helpful cousins don’t stop Reed, then his sense of duty might do what the others cannot.
Because Reed now finds himself caught between two goals – solving the murder of Elise or chasing down whoever stole the Goddess’ hand, an unfathomable thief who might hold answers about his parents…
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Summer in the City
Reed Lavender Book 3
Reed is about to snap - and this time, nothing is going to stand in his way when it comes to getting answers for Elise, not even a supposedly long-vanished Sumerian God.
Or so Reed thinks.
But summer in the city isn't going to be like the others. The city itself isn't quite the same either, and even if you're lucky (or cursed) enough to count the children of Gods among your friends, nothing is ever simple...
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Ashley is a poet, novelist and ex-teacher living in Australia.
He taught English, Media and Music Production, he ‘sang’ in a metal band, worked in an art gallery and for a few years, slaved away at music retail. (For a few years, he was also a legal secretary).
Aside from reading and writing, Ashley loves (indoor) volleyball, Studio Ghibli and Magnum PI.
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Reed Lavender's gift is compelling precisely because it has limits. A dead person's last words may point him toward the truth, but they cannot tell him how all the pieces fit together. That leaves room for the detective behind the supernatural ability—and for cases in which justice depends on Reed being willing to keep digging when everyone else has stopped.
Across the three books featured here, that search for answers widens from Elise's death into Reed's missing family, divine interference, and increasingly strange trouble throughout his city. For an investigator who makes a habit of listening when the dead speak, ignoring unfinished business was probably never going to be an option.
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