Castillo uses mystery tropes to explore the contact zones of Amish culture with nature, outsiders, and the dead.
Half a dozen long stories, five of them written between 2020 and 2024, about formerly Amish police chief Kate Burkholder, who keeps watching cultural borders in Painters Mill, Ohio, shimmer and shake.
In “The Pact,” Kate seeks a pair of tween boys, the Amish Aaron Kuhns and the “Englischer” Kevin Dennison, who’ve defied Kevin’s family, which has forbidden their friendship, in becoming blood brothers on a night of adventure that turns perilous. “Disappeared” asks whether Little Joe Kline, a 2-year-old who’s vanished from his Amish family’s home, has been taken by his birth father, Thomas McKee, a non-Amish man with a troubled past. In “Blood Moon,” the locals are terrorized, and several of them attacked, by a shadowy beast. Is it a bear or a wolf, neither of them native to Ohio—or, still worse, a mythical chupacabra? Human remains originally buried in an Amish cemetery whose new owner plans to open a B&B turn up in three different locations in “Hallowed Ground.” In “Dark Storm Rising,” Kate’s honeymoon with Agent John Tomasetti, of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, takes the newlyweds to the lakeside Sugar Maple Cabins, where Kate’s fond memories of her childhood are seriously disrupted by a snowstorm, the disappearance of one of their hosts, and the torching of one of the cabins. The title story, published here for the first time, uses a series of roadway accidents involving cars, buggies, drivers, and passengers to upend an Amish couple’s plan to spirit their granddaughter away from her unsuitable beau. Most of the stories aren’t very mysterious, but they’re so varied that many readers will put down the volume without noticing the lack of a single fatality.
Castillo uses mystery tropes to explore the contact zones of Amish culture with nature, outsiders, and the dead.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781250427052
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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