The Hidden One is the 14th Kate Burkholder procedural thriller by Linda Castillo. Due out 5th July 2022 from Macmillan on their St. Martin's Press imprint, it's 320 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.
This is a very well written murder mystery and although it's number 14 in the series, it works well as a standalone. All the background character and setting information is provided in the book itself. There is an ongoing, multi-book, partnership between formerly-Amish small-town police chief Kate and her significant other, a retired cop as well as an ensemble cast of colleagues. I do recommend reading the previous books, they're all solid. The series is well plotted and full of believable characters and inter-agency police stories.
The sense of place is
palpable. There are a number of Amish characters (the small town where
Chief of Police Kate Burkholder works is a rural agricultural area
inhabited by a number of Amish families). The author's descriptions are
nuanced and believable. I found some of the dialogue jarring because
it's liberally sprinkled with Pennsylvania Dutch, but the author is
adept at translating, and most of it is understandable from context. This is another (very) cold case mystery, surrounding the disappearance of an Amish bishop from a different Amish area than the town where Kate lives and works and involving people she herself was involved with almost 2 decades previously. She's cut off from her support network and this is almost exclusively an off-the-books solo investigation on Kate's part, without official sanction or access.
The characters are impressively nuanced. It takes a quite a lot of technical expertise to write characters who do bad things but aren't necessarily bad people and subtlety to allow readers to arrive at their own conclusions. The denouement and resolution were well written and satisfying and although I had guessed the overall theme of the crimes and motivations underlying, there were some really surprising twists at the end.
The unabridged audiobook has a run time of 9 hours and 18 minutes and is narrated capably and well by Kathleen McInerney. She has a warm and rich clear alto voice and does a good job delineating the widely varied accents of a range of characters of all ages and both sexes including elderly and children's voices. Sound and production quality are high throughout the recording.
Four and a half stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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