Sunday, September 21, 2014

59. The Dead Will Tell - Linda Castillo

Kate Burkholder #6
2014 Minotaur Books
304 pgs.
Adult Murder Mystery
Finished 9/13/2014
Goodreads rating: 4.15
My rating: (5) Awesome, a great story
Setting: Contemporary small-town Painters Mill,  Ohio in Amish Country "

1st sentence/s: from Prologue:  "He dreamed of pneumatic sanders flying over the finest burled wood and full-blind dovetail joints chiseled with such precision that you couldn't see the interlocking pins and tails."
from Chapter 1: "John Tomasetti is standing at the kitchen counter chopping green peppers when my cell erupts."

My comments:   Don't ya hate it when you wait and wait for a book to be published and then you wait and wait for it to get to you from the library's very long reserve list....and then it's done and finished waaaaay too fast?  I couldn't put this down.  Not a lot of surprises, but it didn't really matter in this story, watching it weave in and out and back and forth, taking shape....with a few asides about what was going on inside Tomasetti's world....was just what I'd anticipated and craved.  I love Linda Castillo's storytelling.  I got to Holmes Country, Ohio, for the second time this summer, driving even more in and around and through Millersburg and Berlin and Walnut Creek.  I love the area.  And although this book was jarring and full-of-anguish, it was a great read.

Goodreads book summary:  Everyone in Painters Mill knows the abandoned Hochstetler farm is haunted. But only a handful of the residents remember the terrible secrets lost in the muted/hushed whispers of time—and now death is stalking them, seemingly from the grave.
          On a late-night shift, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder is called to the scene of an apparent suicide—an old man found hanging from the rafters in his dilapidated barn. But evidence quickly points to murder and Kate finds herself chasing a singularly difficult and elusive trail of evidence that somehow points back to the tragedy of that long ago incident. Meanwhile, Kate has moved in with state agent John Tomasetti and for the first time in so long, they're both happy; a bliss quickly shattered when one of the men responsible for the murders of Tomasetti’s family four years ago is found not guilty, and walks away a free man. Will Tomasetti be pulled back to his own haunted past?
          When a second man is found dead—also seemingly by his own hand—Kate discovers a link in the case that sends the investigation in a direction no one could imagine and revealing the horrifying truth of what really happened that terrible night thirty-five years ago, when an Amish father and his four children perished—and his young wife disappeared without a trace.

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