THE AMISH WIFE

Historical true-crime account of a pregnant Amish woman who died suspiciously in 1977.

In his 1990 book, Abandoned Prayers, Olsen reported on a series of grisly murders allegedly committed by Eli Stutzman, a former member of an Amish community in Ohio. Now, dozens of books later, the author returns to the topic he says has haunted him all these years. Before Eli became a murderer, his wife, Ida, died suspiciously in a fire. Olsen—and others in the Amish community, he is quick to point out—is convinced that Eli was responsible for her death, and he sets out to prove it. Despite the subtitle, he doesn’t quite complete the mission. Olsen’s writing is engaging, his research is thorough, and his methods seem to be sound. He writes about the Amish with nuance and respect and, thankfully, without sentimentality—which might be one reason so many Amish men and women agreed to grant Olsen interviews. However, the author often lingers too long on the circumstances surrounding his research process rather than the research itself—e.g., “My oil-slick coffee finally, and thankfully, vanquished, I pick through the pages of the autopsy report and pause to write a single word on the outside of the file folder in block letters. For emphasis, I underscore it three times. ‘C-o-n-s-p-i-r-a-c-y?’” Cringeworthy moments like this aside, Olsen has a gift for taking mountains of paperwork and interview material and weaving them into a cohesive narrative that is often difficult to put down, especially for die-hard true-crime fans. Because he frames the book as a step-by-step process of discovery, readers will feel like they’re right there with him as he’s knocking on doors and spinning out on the Midwestern ice.

An engaging, well-researched historical excavation that could have benefited from tighter editing and further revision.