Hunting Ground

March 30, 2020
Holloway (Once unto the Breach) travels familiar terrain in this unremarkable serial killer novel. Evelyn Hutto has moved from Georgia, where she survived a traumatic experience that left her wary of all men, to Raven’s Gap, Mont., to work as the assistant collections manager at the Park County Museum. Unfortunately for her, the local bookstore owner, Jeff Roosevelt, is a predator, who views meeting Evelyn as a “good omen” that reawakens his misogynistic, murderous tendencies. Jeff’s violent streak isn’t a complete secret; police officer Hector Lewis, who’s nearing retirement, is still hoping to find evidence to implicate him in the disappearance, 15 years earlier, of Lewis’s wife and daughter. The plot unfolds from the perspectives of these three main characters. Jeff’s chapters open, heavy-handedly, with quotes from such notorious serial murderers as Albert Fish and Jeffrey Dahmer. Readers should be prepared for minimal suspense. Neither the prose nor the characters leave much of an impression.

May 1, 2020
Evelyn Hutto moves to a remote Montana town, Raven's Gap, for a new start and a job working to catalog Native American artifacts. From the opening scene, readers can tell that Evelyn is on the run from something serious. Her new life quickly turns ominous; a police officer she meets upon arrival, Hector Lewis, nurses a long-held grudge against a local man, Jeff Roosevelt, who soon makes sinister remarks to Evelyn. When the dead bodies of local women start appearing, Evelyn fears for her life and is forced to find her own path to safety, a task she's familiar with as the survivor of violence. The people of Raven's Gap seem oddly detached from the danger in their midst, and a plot point involving the faking of computer evidence underestimates police forensic abilities. Still, it is absorbing to follow Evelyn and Hector's pursuits of Jeff, and Holloway's subplot involving possible fraud relating to Native artifacts proves fascinating. A good choice for patrons looking for their next book after Anne Hillerman's The Tale Teller (2019).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)