Review: Fields Where They Lay

 Okay, I'm a sucker for a good Christmas story, and this is the best one I've read in a
while. It's also the best Junior Bender story I've read, and it's #6. 

Of course, it's not your usual Christmas story. Not when the main character is a thief who specializes (whether he likes it or not) in clearing up problems for some pretty nasty crooks, and this time finds himself working for perhaps the nastiest of the whole bunch, a guy who's as likely to murder him at the end of the job as pay him. 

    And our hero is pretty ambivalent about Christmas. And his girlfriend seems to hate the holiday. And he's stuck in the crummiest of crummy malls in the lead-up to Christmas, eternally playing shlocky Christmas carols. And he's pretty sure that the supposed reason he's been hired is not really the reason he's been hired at all. (Which is admittedly, par for the course in a Junior Bender novel.) And did I mention the murder?

    And yet, it really is a guaranteed, choke 'em up, weepy Christmas tale to touch your heart, even though even the writer is not too sold on Christmas. How you ask? Read the holly-jolly book.

Fields Where They Lay can be found here on Amazon.