While the main driver of a mystery is supposed to be, you know, the mystery, I’ve found it’s often just as important that the person leading the investigation is someone you don’t mind hanging around for a bit. The genre is rich with prickly sorts and antiheroes, but it’s that aspect of personability that really makes the difference in my book. Archer Sullivan’s The Witch’s Orchard certainly fits that bill.
Annie Gore, private investigator, is living the kind of no-rules life that would have been unthinkable—or just a daydream—when she was an Air Force investigator. Being her own boss does, however, come with a somewhat less-regular paycheck than the service offered, which is why she takes a job in small-town Appalachia that both she and her client are pretty sure is futile. Ten years ago, three young girls disappeared from the tiny town, and only one came back. Annie’s client is Matt, the older brother of the last girl who vanished, and, at eighteen with a dead mother and a father who can’t stand to stay long in the house that used to be home to the happy family of four, needs some kind of closure before he can start his life. Annie knows she can’t promise that, but she can promise to stay for a week and stir up old wounds.
That’s exactly what she does, retracing the original investigation and striking out on her own. Some people are more willing to talk than they were a decade ago, but the reverse is more often true. Still, there are some friendly faces. Matt’s friend Shiloh and her young daughter keep Annie’s belly full of baked goods, while AJ, a deputy, is a whole lot more welcoming than his boss. Little by little, Annie finds her own foothold in this new investigation. Perhaps too much of a foothold, as the metaphorical hornets whose nests she’s stirred up start flying her way.
Annie is a delight of a modern-day PI, with all the crustiness and baggage of any private dick in the genre, though Sullivan manages to make her feel more human than trope. No private investigator is complete without a sidekick, real or inanimate, and Annie’s Honey, a classic Datsun that guzzles oil like some cars guzzle gas, fills that role nicely. Annie’s scars, inside and out, are less character definition than woven throughout. Her conversations with Leo, a former colleague and current friend, take place both in the muddled present and the contextual past. And while much of the plot centers around women and girls, and children and the rearing thereof, her personal feelings about reproduction are less an overriding theme of thinking and more a stray consideration in a quiet moment late in the story, especially since that’s not true of all the characters without children.
In much the same way as Annie’s rural Appalachian upbringing allows her to navigate the town’s complex social structure more successfully than previous out-of-town investigators, Sullivan draws these characters without judgement or malice, even when it would be easy or thematic to do so. From a witness’s immaculate house on the hill to the run-down home of one of the victims to the cottage of a witchy suspect, Annie makes observations—and while she has her own critical thoughts, they’re rarely along class lines. And she gives the proper respect to the seemingly endless iterations of the local folk tale, understanding that the “true” in “true story” can mean many things.
For the reader, Sullivan lets us discover the mystery and our investigator detail by detail, showing her hand just enough to make us feel clever at guessing a few plot points while keeping the bulk of the story under wraps until the end. Altogether, I tore through “The Witch’s Orchard” and was sad to see it, and Annie, go. With a little luck, Annie and Honey will be back for more.
Ring Reads 