BRIMSTONE HOLLOW

A second case for Louisville, Kentucky, shamus Annie Gore turns out to be even more of a witch’s brew than her first.

Katie May’s long-estranged father died yesterday after getting bitten by a snake. His fate is both more and less surprising given that Ezra King morphed years ago from a gambling addict to the devoutly snake-handling preacher at eastern Kentucky’s Mount Zion Church. Even though she hadn’t spoken to her father since the day he brought home his first copperhead and his wife took their daughter and left, Katie, who’d had a prophetic vision of Ezra minutes before she learned of his death, wants to know more. Since Brother Ezra was buried without the benefit of an autopsy the day after he breathed his last, those answers won’t be easy to come by. But Annie, who’s been visited by dreams and visions of her own father for many years, can’t resist taking the case. Soon after she arrives in Mt. Zion, the body count begins to rise, stretching from presumed drug-ring heir Billy Shepherd to ex-con mechanic Dean Griffon. Although police chief Matthew Dishman doesn’t think the deaths are connected, Annie works her heart out to convince him they are. Over Dishman’s objections, she uncovers enough new evidence to provoke an exhumation of Brother Ezra’s body, and that produces a whopping surprise, which raises more questions than it settles. As in Annie’s striking debut, The Witch’s Orchard (2025), Sullivan concocts a stew that combines hard-boiled tropes, third-wave feminism, down-home small-town gossip, rumors of organized and less organized crime, unexpected eruptions of violence, and “fringe fundamentalism.”

Behind it all simmers Annie’s flashbacks to life with her father, who this time provides more challenge than assistance.