The Names of Our Tears

April 1, 2013
In Gaus’s fine eighth novel set in the area of northeast Ohio where a large concentration of Amish and Mennonite families live (after 2011’s Harmless as Doves), coexisting more or less peacefully with their “Yankee” neighbors, the murder of Ruth Zook, who recently returned home to Ohio from Florida with a heavy suitcase, leads hard-driving Sheriff Bruce Robertson to discover that young Amish women have been coerced into transporting cocaine from the Sunshine State. Even though the police are distrusted by the people they’re trying to protect, the sheriff’s department attempts to track down the drug ring operating in rural Holmes County. Meanwhile, Pastor Cal Troyer, the minister for an independent church, tries to repair the human damage the crimes have caused. Readers won’t find snappy patter, brilliant deduction, or violent melodrama—just a record of serious, stubborn people plodding along, doing the best they can to heal their community. Agent: Jenny Bent, the Bent Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2013
The shooting of a teenage girl rocks the Amish community of Holmes County, Ohio. Maybe it isn't just the fine Coblentz chocolate that sends Mervin Byler on his seventh trip this spring to the widow Stutzman's shop in Walnut Creek. On his way, he encounters the unimaginable: the body of 19-year-old Ruth Zook, shot through the head and lying beneath the hooves of her terrified horse. Just back from the Amish settlement of Pinecraft, near Sarasota, Ruth has spent the past two days in her room, speaking to no one but Emma Wengerd, the shy, haunted child adopted by the Zooks after her family died in a buggy accident. Sheriff Bruce Robertson (Harmless as Doves, 2011, etc.) is desperate for a lead, but the Zooks close ranks. Even local pastor Cal Troyer fails to reach Emma, who can't cry and can't pray, but can only sit wordlessly, too angry at God to speak. When fish start to die from the cocaine Ruth dumped from her suitcase into the Zooks' pond, Robertson knows that it's drug dealers he's looking for. But even when Fannie Helmuth, another Amish girl, confesses that she too brought a suitcase full of drugs back from Pinecraft, he has little to go on. All Fannie knows is that she gave the suitcase to an angry-looking woman with dark hair. Frustrated, the sheriff sends Deputy Ricky Niell to Florida to find Jodie Tapp, the young Mennonite waitress who gave Fannie her suitcase. But even if he finds her, can Jodie help the Holmes County Police identify a murderer over 500 miles away? Once again, Gaus probes the tension between the self-reliance of the Amish world and the urgencies of the English world with depth and sensitivity.

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April 1, 2013

Drug dealers from Florida infiltrate the Ohio Amish community, and violent death follows. Sheriff Bruce Robertson and his trusted partners return for their eighth case (after Harmless as Doves) in this well-regarded series.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2013
Modern life intrudes upon the Amish of Holmes County, Ohio, in shocking fashion when a young woman in the community is found murdered, and her family farm contaminated. Ruth Zook, shot shortly after returning from an Amish retreat in Pinecraft, Florida, was apparently a reluctant mule, who threw the cocaine she had carried into the pond by her house, bringing out the EPA in full force. Sheriff Bruce Robertson pieces together events after another young Amish woman comes forward with a similar story, convincing him that the local situation is part of a much bigger problem. Gaus' narrative occasionally slows with an overabundance of procedural detail, but series regulars Professor Michael Branden, in Pinecraft, and Pastor Cal Troyer provide comfort and continuity in this eighth Amish-country mystery. Loose ends in the murder case lend realism and augur well for the next installment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)