THE DEAD WILL TELL (2014)
Linda Castillo
Minotaur Books, 320
pages, ISBN 978-1250029577
* * *
Call this one a classic beach read novel. This is book six
of Linda Castillo’s Kate Burkholder series. For those, like me, who came in
late, Burkholder is chief of police in Painters Mill, an Ohio town analogous to
Lancaster, Pennsylvania in that it’s in the middle of Amish country. Kate is
perfect for the job in that she grew up Amish and speaks their special Deutsch tongue. Tag line: She gave up her bonnet for a badge!
Kate is an intuitive crime solver, not a hard-broiled
detective; in fact, I imagined her as a bit like Marge Gunderson from the movie
Fargo, except Kate has a damaged
lover, former state agent John Tomasetti, whose family was murdered by vengeful
mobsters. Family murder is at the heart of The
Dead Will Tell, whose mysteries begin when an elderly businessman is found
hanging in a barn. It looks like a suicide, except that the corpse also has a
slug in him and an Amish peg doll rammed into his throat. Other pillars of
Painters Mill begin to receive notes bearing messages such as “I know what you
did” and “You were there.” As the body count and peg doll counts rise, Kate
begins to think these events may be linked to a thirty-year-old unsolved crime:
the murder of Amish woodworker Willis Hochstetler, the abduction/presumed
assassination of his wife Wanetta, and a subsequent fire that killed four of
his five children. Even more unsettling are reports that Wanetta’s ghost has
been spotted. That eliminates the logical suspect, surviving Hochstetler son,
William.
Burkholder’s search takes her deep into old archives and the
present-day Amish community, not to mention that it unclosets a few local
skeletons. It also keeps her busy at exactly the time that she fears Tomasetti
will seek victim’s revenge on a rich punk implicated in his family’s murder,
but freed on a legal technicality. Okay, so none of this rises to the level of
the 1985 film Witness. And, yes, the
overlapping family murders are more contrived than convincing. As mysteries go,
this one isn’t hard to figure out; unless you believe in ghosts, there’s only
one logical explanation. Nor can I praise the book’s literary merits. (Let’s
just say the prose wouldn’t tax a teen.) It is exactly as I categorized it: a
page-turner thriller to consume under a beach umbrella. Like that ice cream
cone in the other hand, The Dead Will
Tell is a guilty pleasure. You can repent by reading a Dickens novel on the
treadmill when you get home.
Rob Weir
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