SWORN TO SILENCE
Linda Castillo
Minotaur Books
Thriller
ISBN: 9780312374976
“A gun-toting, cursing former Amish female chief of police.”
That quote belongs to John Tomasetti, one of the characters in Linda Castillo’s debut thriller. It refers to Kate Burkholder, the 30-year-old chief of police in Painters Mill, Ohio, a fictional rural municipality set in real-life Holmes County. Castillo is a much-revered author of romance novels; with SWORN TO SILENCE, she demonstrates an ability to cross genre lines with astounding ease.
Burkholder is an eight-year veteran of the Columbus, OH police force who returned to her native Painters Mill to accept the job as police chief. She knows the town and most of its residents, given that she was raised in the Amish community there. Though under the Amish tough-love proscription of the bann due to her leaving Amish life, she still has her foot in the worlds of both the Amish and the English (those outside of the Amish world). Her job in Painters Mill for most of two years has consisted primarily of arresting drunk drivers and citing farmers for letting their cows roam onto the rural roads that crisscross the town proper.
All of that changes abruptly, however, when the horribly mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in a field. The method of the murder awakens dormant memories in a number of the townspeople, no more so than Burkholder. A similar series of crimes had occurred in the community 16 years before, when four young ladies were murdered. The killings abruptly stopped; now, it appears, the killer is back. Burkholder, however, is almost certain that it cannot be the same person, due to a secret that she and two others have kept since she was 14 years old. If the same killer has returned, then everything she knows is wrong; yet if the past murders are reopened, she risks not only her own career, but also the lives of those who have kept her secret. Burkholder is hesitant to call in assistance from other law enforcement agencies, as she does not want other investigators uncovering what has gone before. Yet the investigation required into the new murder is clearly beyond the resources of her department.
When another young woman is killed, the city council brings in John Tomasetti, an investigator for the state BCI. Tomasetti is badly bent, if not totally broken, an alcoholic with a short fuse and a penchant for following his own rules. Burkholder, for her part, remains damaged from events that occurred before; when the two meet, their working relationship is not made in heaven. They do gradually acquire a mutual if uneasy respect, as well as a slowly developing attraction that both fear and neither entirely welcomes. The killer, though, is still out there, and his violence is escalating. When a third victim is discovered, Burkholder is summarily fired, but she stays on the case on her own time, continuing her investigation while seeking the identity of the real killer and thus putting herself up as the field’s next victim.
Linda Castillo is a resident of Texas, a world away from what is known as Holmes County Amish country. Yet her description of Amish life, as well as the tolerant if occasionally prickly mix between the Amish and English, is as spot-on as if she had lived there all of her life. What makes SWORN TO SILENCE a one-sit read, however, is her ability to engage in subtle contrast, to describe the quiet and tranquil surface of life in the rural county with the undercurrent of violence that dramatically reveals itself without warning. Castillo’s descriptions of what was done to the unfortunate victims is unflinching --- there is one scene where my stomach went upside down, and I have been reading descriptions of graphic violence for decades --- but her ability to describe a romantic interlude with all of the details we know and love certainly doesn’t suffer from her foray into a different genre.
Burkholder is an impressive, believable and, yes, vulnerable heroine, and Castillo is an immensely readable recorder of her fictional exploits. I can’t wait to see more of both of them.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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