Sworn to Silence

The crime fiction genre is becoming a very crowded one these days, and a writer has to come up with something special to distinguish themselves from hordes of sales-hungry fellow crime practitioners. In a variety of books, Linda Castillo has demonstrated that she has the smarts to rise above many of her rivals, and with her latest book, Sworn to Silence, she demonstrates that her customary skills are still firmly in place.

The setting is a placid Ohio town, Painters Mill, in which two groups of residents manage to rub along together: the religious sect, the Amish, and the ordinary residents of the town, known (in distancing fashion) as the ‘English’. But this is a Linda Castillo novel, and it will come as no surprise to the reader to realise that this peaceful town harbours dark secrets: over 10 years ago, a sequence of savage killings tore the community apart, and had a corollary affect. Youthful Katie Burkholder was a member of the Amish community, but realised that she could not live by its rules and strictures, and that her view of the world was not that of her coreligionists. 15 years have passed, and Katie has now become chief of police. (In fact, this aspect of Castillo's novel already marks it out as different from most of the current entries in the genre; the concept of the female Amish-turned-copper is a truly novel one and puts paid to any uncharitable thoughts that Castillo may have borrowed some ideas from the Harrison Ford film Witness, in which a detective solves a murder in an Amish community.) In Sworn to Silence, the body of a young woman is discovered in a snow-covered field, and it bears a grisly mutilation: numbers have been carved into the stomach of the dead girl. She is the first in a line of victims, and the long maintained peace in the town is soon a distant memory. The best thing about the new book is definitely the characterisation of the conflicted cop Katie Burkholder, struggling with the psychological legacy (and religious indoctrination) of her past while having to deal with a very present danger. It is a highly compelling read, and whets the appetite for the next Linda Castillo novel. --Barry Forshaw